NEWS
Announcing MFractor 2.7.0
Automatically implement entire view models in a few clients, a dozen new XAML analysers have been added and add type-safety to your ValueConverters using ValueconversionAttribute. If you aren't using MFractor then you are stealing money and time from your client.
Most Valuable Professional - Geoffrey Huntley
What a way to start 2017! I am excited to announce that Microsoft has awarded me a nice shiny trophy and a bunch of perks in recognition for my contributions to the Xamarin and dotnet open-source community.
CODE
Proposal: Disposables in CoreFx: SerialDisposable, CompositeDisposable, etc
A rando conversation in Slack quickly escalated into a proposal to promote disposables from System.Reactive
NuGet package into CoreFX as System.Disposables
. Make sure you check out this comment.
Multi-targeting the world: a single project to rule them all
Starting with Visual Studio 2017, you can now use a single project to build platform-specific libraries for all project types. Oren Novotny explores why you might want to do this, how to do it and workarounds for some point-in-time issues with the tooling.
TESTING
Want to save _serious_ cash ($200k+) in Xamarin Test Cloud? Here's how
I created Cake.AppleSimulator
to perform e2e tests as part of CI for open-source libraries. Robert N has taken the concept and gone next level with it to pinch pounds in the cloud:
To bring it back to this project and I am using it as one of a series of required criteria for submitting commits/pull requests before allowing those changes to ripple up through a chain of tiered automated unit testing that start on a small CI and mobile test cloud before allowing it to get to the full-blown test cloud. Just yesterday it blocked 6 pull requests due to iOS specific code mistakes that would have normally consumed about 3 hours of private mobile cloud time at $500/hour, over a year we are expecting it to save a minimum of 120 hours on cloud time, we are also doing with Android AVDs, and macOS VMs and are seeing a saving $200k a year in test hours.
Seedy Fake Users (Part 1 of 2)
Ever been on a project where a dev comes on board, and has to clone databases in order to get test data? What about when you just want to nuke all your test data and start afresh - is starting afresh pretty painful eh? What if there was a better way....
ANDROID
Entity Framework on Xamarin.Android
Oh god; why would you do this? </troll> Jon - bravo, I'm not sure if I should be congratulating you or mailing you some eyebleach. Either way I would be exremely interested in seeing some perf/allocations metrics. Is EF heavy? Why not just use Akavache?
XAMARIN FORMS
Xamarin.Forms Feature Roadmap
Monotouch.Dialog is making a comeback tour. I'm v.excited about the ability to use Xamarin.Forms within a standard application to quickly (or dynamically) scaffold data entry views. This is the start of allowing Xamarin.Forms to be used as a library, instead as of a Framework.
PROPOSAL - Improved life cycle support
Kent Boogaart, one of the authors of ReactiveUI has raised the first accepted community proposal to resolve/add view life cycle hooks to enable frameworks to manage the activation and deactivation of resources in response to the comings and goings of views.
NUGET OF THE WEEK
FilePicker Plugin for Xamarin.Forms
Simple cross-platform plug-in that allows you to pick files from the filesystem and work with them.
AND FINALLY...
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