Issue 224

LUCE CARTER

It has been a busy week here at Weekly Xamarin HQ and the content has been no different! A great variety of articles for you to enjoy!

Here in the Northern Hemisphere, Autumn/Fall is starting to creep in while our friends in the Southern Hemipshere are no doubt looking forward to the start of Spring and eventually Summer!

Keep up the amazing work with all your community contributions and have a great weekend whatever you have planned!

Luce ❤️

NEWS

Xamarin.Forms 4.3 Prerelease and the CarouselView Challenge

Xamarin.Forms 4.3 is available as a pre release and with it, the long awaited CarouselView! We have seen an increase in the number of challenges available this year, and now we have another one! The challenge (that will win you some stickers and maybe even a monkey), is to recreate a page that would be suitable for CarouselView and report your findings.

Xamarin.Forms 4.3 Prerelease and the CarouselView Challenge by Paul DiPietro

GETTING STARTED

Keep Up to Date With the Latest Xamarin Docs

The Xamarin docs are one of the best sources of information for building apps in Xamarin.Forms and native Xamarin. Not only do you get loads of documentation on each API, you will also find a quickstart guide and tutorials! In this post, Craig summarises some of the great things you can find there as well as listing some of the community contributors who contributed to the docs in August, thanks to it all being open sourced on GitHub!

DESIGN

Dark Mode

As designers, we often base our color choices on what looks best for the specific element we are working on. When we do this, the only consistency will be our personal taste and we might end up with a slightly inconsistent use of colors because of it.

Dark Mode by Søren Clausen

DEVOPS

Deploy your Xamarin.Android application using Azure DevOps and App Center

In this tutorial, Damien shows you how to build and sign your Xamarin.Android application and distribute it to your users through App Center.

How to build, sign and deploy your Xamarin.Android application using Azure DevOps and App Center by Damien Aicheh

XAMARIN FORMS

Check for Dark Mode in Xamarin.Forms

Both iOS 13 and Android Q now let the user enable Dark Mode for their operating system. In this post, Brandon explores how to check if the user has enabled Dark Mode in your Xamarin.Forms app!

Check for Dark Mode in Xamarin.Forms by Brandon Minnick

Making ObservableCollection Thread-Safe in Xamarin.Forms

ObservableCollection is the recommended collection to use for ListViews, but it isn't thread safe. In this post, Brandon explores how we can fix this and use it in our multi-threaded apps!

Making ObservableCollection Thread-Safe in Xamarin.Forms by Brandon Minnick

SourceLink Support for Xamarin.Forms

With the availability of Xamarin.Forms 4.3-pre1, you can now gain access to SourceLink support in Xamarin.Forms. In this post, Gerald covers not only what SourceLink is but how to get started today!

SourceLink Support for Xamarin.Forms by Gerald Versluis

Contributing to Xamarin.Forms: My Story

There has been an increase in the number of different people contributing to Xamarin.Forms now which is fantastic! Gerald, who now works on the Xamarin.Forms team, shares his story of getting started contributing to Xamarin.Forms.

Contributing to Xamarin.Forms: My Story by Gerald Versluis

Working with Visual States (Part I - Binding)

There's multiple ways of handling visual states in your app pages, views or controls. Depending on how you utilise these techniques, they all might be fine to use. However, you don't need to stick with just one way of handling your states, they all have their pros and cons.

In this first post in a series on Visual States, Mikolaj looks at the pro's and con's of directly binding to the UI element visibility property.

Working with Visual States (Part I - Binding) by Mikolaj Kieres

Advanced Xamarin.Forms Part 1 – The API

Renowned Pluralsight author and Xamarin developer, podcaster and blogger Jesse Liberty is back with a new series on advanced Xamarin.Forms. In part 1, he talks you through creating an API that will live on Azure and support all CRUD operations.

Advanced Xamarin.Forms Part 1 – The API by Jesse Liberty

Using Native Facebook Login Button in Xamarin.Forms QA

Login is a very common scenario in all applications, not just mobile. A lot of people prefer to use existing accounts either for Social Media or others like Google/Microsoft instead of creating a whole new account. Evgeny Zborovsky answers some questions about how to use Facebook login in Xamarin.Forms.

Using Native Facebook Login Button in Xamarin.Forms QA by Evgeny Zborovksy

NUGET OF THE WEEK

Xamarin Forms MediaElement now available for macOS

InTheHand.Forms is a set of extra Xamarin.Forms API's introducing more components for your Xamarin.Forms applications. One of these is the MediaElement. A new version is now available with support for...macOS!

Xamarin Forms MediaElement now available for macOS by Peter Foot

PODCASTS & VIDEOS

Xamarin: .NET Community Standup - Sept. 5th, 2019 - Android Perf & Startup Challenge + App Bundles

The first Thursday of every month is the Xamarin .NET Community Standup. This is a great place to hear about updates to Xamarin.Forms including community contributions, the presenter's favourite articles from the previous month and learn more about a relevant topic. This month they were joined by Jon Douglas and Jonathan Peppers to talk Android!

The Xamarin Podcast Episode 65: Pull to Refresh, Pull Requests, and Refresh Views

In this month's episode James and Matt talk a bit about everything.

iOS 13 and Android 10 are hot off the presses. Xamarin.Forms 4.2 is too! There's something cool called Boots that will keep your feet dry in the pool of continuous integration and Azure Functions now has Dependency Injection!

Vibration (Xamarin.Essentials API of the Week) | The Xamarin Show

Xamarin.Essentials provides developers with cross-platform APIs for their mobile applications. On this week's Xamarin.Essential API of the week, they take a look at the Vibration API to enable you to easily turn on and off the vibration feature on mobile devices.

Merge Conflict: 166: Disconnecting with a Feature Phone

Smartphones are everywhere and are essential in our day to day lives and our business. James has decided to take a step away from his smartphone and experiment with a few feature phones. He walks us through his journey of trying to find a decent feature phone in the US, what the experience is like, and if he can survive on just a few built in apps.

Issue 224 13th September 2019