Issue 245

LUCE CARTER

Hey everyone,

Happy Friday! Sorry the newsletter is a bit later than usual. Kym is still in Seattle at "The Mothership" and I was on my way back from a trip too and internet wasn't my friend!

A nice varied mix of links this week. As usual, thanks to everyone for their contributions!

I was at NDC London last week, teaching Xamarin to a friend who works at Twilio. We had a great time and it seemed to go down well, yay! Always love sharing our love of Xamarin with new attendees.

Have a great weekend and see you all next week for more fantastic Xamarin content!

Luce 🧡

APP OF THE WEEK

Little Cupid App that Transforms TV into Augmented Reality

I always enjoy reading customer showcase articles on the Xamarin blog as you hear about all the awesome things people are doing with Xamarin. This article is no different!

Little Cupid App that Transforms TV into Augmented Reality by Christos Matskas

DEVOPS

Deploy Xamarin.Forms Apps to App Center from a Azure Multi-Stage Pipeline using Templates and Environments that Require Manual Approval

Sometimes you want to separate the build and release pipelines in Azure DevOps. Unfortunately when using YAML, this can be quite awkward. Nick has you covered however with another post in his series on DevOps. This time he shows you how to deploy to App Center for testing during the build.

Deploy Xamarin.Forms Apps to App Center from a Azure Multi-Stage Pipeline using Templates and Environments that Require Manual Approval by Nick Randolph

TOOLS

Sharpnado's Xamarin.Forms XamlStyler config file

I heard XamlStyler mentioned a few times last year, all for positive reasons. So it's great to see Jean-Marie has gone ahead and shared his config for it when developing Xamarin.Forms XAML.

Sharpnado's Xamarin.Forms XamlStyler config file by Jean-Marie Alfonsi

ANDROID

Using Custom AOT Profiles with Xamarin.Android

For as long as Ryan can remember, Xamarin.Android has given developers the ability to choose between using JIT and AOT compilation for their applications. JIT'ed builds are far smaller, but carry the overhead of runtime method compilation. AOT builds are much larger, but generally more performant - often by a substantial margin. Ryan has a plan to try and get the best of both worlds to get the most performant compilation possible thanks to new features with Startup Tracing/Profile AOT from the Xamarin.Android team.

Using Custom AOT Profiles with Xamarin.Android by Ryan Davis

IOS

Re-signing a IPA file

When working with iOS apps in Xamarin, signing your apps on release is unavoidable. However if your provisioning profile expires, you might not want to release a whole new version with this new profile. Instead you can re-sign the current app!

Re-signing a IPA fileRe-signing a IPA file by Tomasz Cielecki

How To Pick A Document In Xamarin.iOS

The DocumentViewController in iOS allows you to select documents on your iOS device. Logesh teaches you how to get started in a few short steps.

How To Pick A Document In Xamarin.iOS by Logesh Palani

XAMARIN FORMS

WPF Activity in Xamarin Forms

Peter is well known for his InTheHand.Forms library. But he has recently started having some features merged into Xamarin.Forms itself! In this post, Peter touches on his experience getting an ActivityIndicator in WPF.

WPF Activity in Xamarin Forms by Peter Foot

Replicating user profile UI in Xamarin Forms

Profile pages are everywhere! Most apps have them so I was really excited to see Leomaris has replicated a user profile page, made it look beautiful and shared her experience!!

Replicating user profile UI in Xamarin Forms by Leomaris Reyes

Introducing the Xamarin.Forms Chat Control (Conversational UI)

Syncfusion are on fire lately! Not just with their controls being released but also the blog posts about them are always a great read! This time it is the turn of a chat control!

Introducing the Xamarin.Forms Chat Control (Conversational UI) by Neelakandan Kannan

Implementing MSAL authentication in Xamarin.Forms

Authenticating users in our app is a common challenge that mobile developers need to tackle. Leveraging existing authentication systems like those of social networks or big companies like Microsoft’s MSAL saves a lot of development time. But how do we get started?

Implementing MSAL authentication in Xamarin.Forms by Steven Thewissen

Xamarin.Forms Twilio implementation

If you follow me on Twitter, you may be aware I am also a Twilio Champion. I had attempted Twilio bindings for Xamarin last year on my stream but it never got finished. So when I saw this post I jumped with excitement and got straight to reading!!

Xamarin.Forms Twilio implementation by Bence Lenart

Using Bindable Properties In Xamarin.Forms

Here at WeeklyXamarinHQ, we really love MFractor and this blog post on binding properties is great! It explains what they are and how you might use them, but then also goes on to discuss how much easier it can be thanks to a wizard built into MFractor.

Using Bindable Properties In Xamarin.Forms by Les Brown

Improve Xamarin Forms App UX by Data Caching

When developing a mobile app persisting data is important, why? Because a mobile app is not a web app, it shouldn’t depend on having a reliable internet connection 100% of the time. For example, when you open a mobile app to see the list of transactions if you don’t have internet you will only see an empty screen with “There is no internet connection error” message. Won’t it be a better user experience if you could see the latest data cached? Charlin talks you through some options.

Improve Xamarin Forms App UX by Data Caching by Charlin Agramonte