Month: August 2016

Monkey Business – Xamarin Forms 2.3 Released

A new version of Xamarin Forms has been released, with a Xamarin Studio upgrade as well. These are very exciting news for cross platform developers wanting to have more control over the look and feel of their XF application without compromising quality and freshness.

Recently I tweeted about one of the features in XF 2.3, in context of one of Xamarin’s Contests.

I tested the new Native Embedding for Xamarin Forms Shared Projects. This feature is really interesting, as it lets you add components that aren’t fully cross-platform-ish into a Xamarin Forms specific platform, all this from within the Shared Code Project.

That’s inside a ContentPage, ContentView, or even a BoxView! Yay!

In the end I think it’s great news for developers, but maybe not so much for Project Managers, Product Owners, and any other management position. It’s a risk for them, because UI/UX designers usually operate with standard components and sometimes those components aren’t present in the other platform (iOS checkboxes, radio buttons, hello? hehe), and for the developer it’s sometimes confusing whether to complain about an over complicated flow which is cross-platform or to create 2 (two) separate workflows to have consistency with the platform itself. It’s a risk for managers, because in the end, the developer (the ones that figure there’s an existing 1 platform native component) tends to use these “hashtags” called preprocessor directives, making the compilation process of the application conditional to the specific platform. But, wasn’t this the one case the managers were trying to avoid, in favor of speeding cross-platform-ing?

TL;DR

To continue the fun part of this post, after a couple of weeks I received confirmation that I won the code-monkey plushy and here’s the end result of all this:

It’s clearer as days pass that it’s getting easier to be a good developer. If you are such one, convince your manager that too much cross-platform-ing can kill pandas, make kittens sad, and encourage global warming, and leveraging platform specific design strategies, save lives, and speed up the whole development process, and even may reduce the amount of Giphys sent in a day… LOL!

This is a very good step forward for developers to write awesome apps in C#, but beware the platform specific documentation… LOL

Again, thanks to #xamarin for the code-monkey and I’m looking forward to get into more of their contests.

Cheers!