Category: C#

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!

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Xamarin Forms 2.2.0.5-pre2 Released

Hi all,

This is great news, Xamarin Forms NuGet package will get another big upgrade with 2.2.0 stable release.

I got notice about it because one of the bugs I reported about CarouselPage is in RESOLVED status. It seems that CarouselPage is going to be deprecated in favor of a new View called CarouselView.

I’m very excited about the amount of bug fixes and new features in 2.2.0 and I’m looking forward to test 2.2.0 stable release. Specifically, as an Android fan I’m looking forward to upgrade the Google Play Services packages to 29.x to have the latest packages and stay updated in the cross-platform world.

For more information on the bug fixes and new features in this pre-release version, check out the official release notes.

What do you think about this pre-release? Have you tried it yet? Let me hear your experiences in the comments section.

Xamarin Adventures: Consistent Cross-Platform Multi-Threading

Hi there readers! Like I said in the last post, I wanted to write something about Xamarin, and now that it’s open source you might be more interested than before in taking this framework for a spin.

Xamarin is a .NET framework used to build Android, iOS, Mac and Windows Phone apps. It uses C# language features to map Android and iOS APIs and also has a top level abstraction called Xamarin Forms to achieve the most common user story scenarios.

I will start these series of posts, with one question that I think is a keystone to all subsequent development issues you might find when dealing with multi-threading.

Continue reading Xamarin Adventures: Consistent Cross-Platform Multi-Threading

Xamarin Adventures of an Android guy

I’ve been doing cross-platform mobile applications for quite a long while now. I’ve done some PhoneGap apps, and Android apps, and now is the time for Xamarin.

Xamarin is a technology that’s growing fast, and as a mobile developer, is an unescapable career experience. With Xamarin I’ve been able to make iPhone apps for some clients and I’ve learned the importance of being a versatile -language agnostic- programmer.

It’s important to know how to achieve the same goals regardless of the platform you are a fan of, and being able to be as productive as you were without your usual tools.

That being said, it’s been also fun and challenging to try to integrate Java and Android technologies to the C# world. I personally used MonoDevelop in the past for doing some Mono projects back in 2008 but I never thought I would be using it this often. It’s fun how the jokes around Free Software and Privative Software start to mix into a "Dude, I know Object Orientation!" statement.

Who knows, maybe in ten years or less I end up coding in OCaml again, like in my college days in Coruña, Spain.

I hope to make a couple of posts in the future, featuring some Android + Xamarin crossovers. Definitely in time for Superman vs Batman crossover this week! Yay!

Cheers!