Issue 220

LUCE CARTER

Hey friends,

Another great newsletter this week with lots of variety of articles. Thanks again to everyone for your amazing contributions!

Not much to report from Weekly Xamarin HQ. I have a free weekend for the first time in ages this weekend, and am looking forward to writing some code and working on blogs :)

Whatever you get up to, I hope you all have a fantastic weekend!

See you next week, Luce ❤️

NEWS

What’s New for Xamarin Developers in Visual Studio 2019 Previews

Visual Studio 2019 version 16.3 Preview 2 and Visual Studio 2019 for Mac version 8.3 Preview 2 have been released and with it, Hot Reload is in Preview!!!!

What’s New for Xamarin Developers in Visual Studio 2019 Previews by Pierce Boggan

DESIGN

Beautiful Xamarin.Forms XAML Layouts with the Golden Ratio

The golden ratio has been identified naturally in nature for hundreds of years. Likewise, in art and architecture, it has been a staple of good composition. In short, humans just find layouts that exhibit the golden ratio naturally pleasing to the eye. It is just magic.

Beautiful Xamarin.Forms XAML Layouts with the Golden Ratio by Robin Schroeder

TOOLS

Introducing Boots: Streamline Xamarin Continuous Integration

Many Xamarin developers take advantage of Azure DevOps or Visual Studio App Center to build and release their mobile applications. Each environment has its own installation of Mono, Xamarin, and everything you would need to build your Xamarin project. Internally, Microsoft use a tool that can install specific builds of Mono, Xamarin, etc. on CI systems. It has been extremely valuable to pin builds to a specific version of Mono, Xamarin.Android, and Xamarin.iOS. They wanted all Xamarin developers to be able to do this, and so Boots was born!

Introducing Boots: Streamline Xamarin Continuous Integration by Jonathan Peppers

XAMARIN FORMS

MediaPlayerElement: Plug and play and crossplatform UI video control

Until now, LibVLCSharp.Forms was providing you with a Xamarin.Forms View with video: the VideoView. You had to implement the usual media player controls and buttons yourself, which was not very convenient when all you want is to get up and running quickly, to focus on your core app functionality (which may not be video playback). Enter the MediaPlayerElement!

MediaPlayerElement: Plug and play and crossplatform UI video control by mtz

The Essential UI Kit for Xamarin.Forms is Ready to Use

Essential UI Kit is now available to the Xamarin community! This update comes with more than 35 reusable XAML pages with the new Visual Studio extension.

The Essential UI Kit for Xamarin.Forms is Ready to Use

Xamarin.Forms - Implement CI/CD using App Center

In this blog post, you will learn how to implement Continuous Integration(CI) and Deployment (CD) using App Center in Xamarin.Forms mobile app. Introduction Xamarin.Forms code runs on multiple platforms - each of which has its own filesystem.

Xamarin.Forms - Implement CI/CD using App Center by Delpin Susai Raj

Header, footer and grouped information in our ListViews in Xamarin Forms

Nowadays, we work with applications that handle a big data sources and that frequently needs to be displayed in a ListView. Working with this control type, it’s important to know that if we just display all the data, it can be overwhelming for our users and that’s not the idea.

Header, footer and grouped information in our ListViews in Xamarin Forms by Leomaris Reyes

Adding a Search Bar to Xamarin.Forms.NavigationPage

Search bars are super useful for a variety of scenarios but they aren't there by default on a Navigation Page in Xamarin.Forms. In this post, Brandon takes you through the steps to achieve just that.

Adding a Search Bar to Xamarin.Forms.NavigationPage by Brandon Minnick

ZXing Barcode Scanning on Android Skipping Frames Issue

ZXing is a well-known library allowing the scanning of barcodes. However it sometimes has an issue on Android with skipping frames. In this post, Gerald discusses a way to solve this issue.

ZXing Barcode Scanning on Android Skipping Frames Issue by Gerald Versluis

NUGET OF THE WEEK

RESTCountries.NET

Kodjo Laurent Egbakou has created a NuGet package to allow you to easily get information about Countries from REST Countries(https://restcountries.eu). In this article, he helps you get started using it.

Getting Started with RESTCountries.NET by Kodjo Laurent EGBAKOU

PODCASTS & VIDEOS

We Love Us Some Android!

In this month's episode James and Matt love Android almost as much as they love going to the dentist ... seriously! There's a ton of Android goodness to discuss and they tackle it all!

We Love Us Some Android! by Xamarin

Xamarin.Forms 101: Design Time Data

This week in Xamarin.Forms 101, Maddy shows us how to visualize your application with design time data with the built in XAML Previewer for iOS and Android.

Xamarin.Forms 101: Design Time Data by Maddy Leger

Merge Conflict: 162: Throttle Those Cancellations

What is the best way to keep your UI responsive and at peak performance? This week on Merge Conflict, they look at ways of properly throttling and using cancelation tokens efficiently.

DevTalk 17: GraphQL. With Brandon Minnick

In episode 17 of DevTalk, Kerry speaks to Brandon Minnick of Microsoft about using GraphQL to query your API.

Xamarin Introductions

Introducing Veronika Kolesnikova

Xamarin Introductions are back and this week we have Veronika Kolesnikova, a developer at RightPoint who not only loves Xamarin but is a Microsoft MVP for AI too!

Tell us a bit about yourself?

Web Developer at Rightpoint, Microsoft MVP (AI) Passionate about backend web development, mainly with Microsoft technologies like C#, .NET, Azure, Xamarin. Public speaker, hackathon volunteer. Curious about mobile, ML and AR. Veronika holds a master degree in Information Technology.

Tell us one thing we probably don't know about you?

One of my hobbies is aerial yoga

How did you first get into Xamarin development?

I was always curios about mobile development, but I never really had time to properly learn Swift or Java/Kotlin, so I was excited to try Xamarin with C# as soon as I heard about it

What has been the most enjoyable project you have built using Xamarin?

My Mixology app where I'm trying new Xamarin features. Great way to learn when you have a fun app to play with

What advice would you give someone looking at getting started with Xamarin development?

Learn from different sources: Microsoft docs, twitch, Pluralsight, attend local meetups and conferences. Xamarin community is amazing and people will be happy to help you.

What are the MUST HAVE tools, resources and libraries that you use when building Xamarin apps?

Xamarin.Essentials, Plugin.Xam.Media, Visual Studio, Xamarin Hot reload, a lot of other tools

Where do you think mobile will be in 5 years?

I'm sure mobile is the future. Smartphones will become the main devices and most of new technologies will be mobile oriented.

To keep up with everything Veronika is up to, hit up some of these links

Blog: veronika.dev

Twitter: twitter.com/breakpointv16

Github: github.com/Veroni4ka

AND FINALLY...

Flutter vs Xamarin

Luis has gone there, yes, he's written an article on Flutter vs Xamarin. It's always interesting to have a look at different frameworks and the various advantages and disadvantages. It's also equally important to realize that different frameworks and tools might be suited better to different projects and skillsets. Despite the slightly click-bait title this isn't a winner takes all article, it's more of a discussion on various aspects of comparison.

Flutter vs Xamarin: An opinion of an analysis by Luis Matos