Sebastián Pérez, Author at XABLU

5 things for .NET MAUI devs to look forward to in 2022

Sebastián Pérez — Tue, 28 Dec 2021 16:21:49 +0000

The year 2021 has brought us a lot of news related to .NET 6. However, we are going to highlight some milestones that must be taken into account for next year:

1. .NET MAUI release: This year we had a working preview of .NET MAUI and a lot of announcements. However, we will have the release of this long-awaited framework for mobile cross-platform development by the middle of next year. If you can’t wait, stay tuned because a release candidate will be out very soon

2. Visual Studio 2022 for Mac: This tool, which was once known as Xamarin Studio, is used by developers who use MacOS environments. For this version 2022 a new version was created using native components to achieve an improvement in performance. The bad news are that we don’t have currently a stable version, but we will soon in 2022. If you want to try, you can find a preview version that can be downloaded here.

3. C#11: Although there is no official announcement of what will come in the next version of this programming language, some issues have already appeared in the Github repository that give us some clues. For example, the keyword field and list patterns, features that were left out of version 10. When ? Probably at .NET 7 release.

4. Microsoft Build 2022: Starting in Q2 2022 we will find Microsoft’s most important developer-oriented event: Microsoft Build. This event, that used to be face-to-face, adopted full-remote in recent years due to the pandemic and although there is no official announcement of the event, we can imagine that it will continue in the same way. In this event the releases roadmap is usually announced for the rest of the year, will it be the chance to see the stable version of .NET MAUI?

5. .NET 7 release: Although .NET 6 is a long support version, the roadmap for this technology tells us that in 2022 we will have version 7 available. This version will be very important for the integration of .NET MAUI, since it will be the first version that supports it from the beginning. When ? November 2022, and as expected a new edition of the .NET Conf will accompany this release.

What are you looking forward the most? I definitely vote .NET MAUI release !

On behalf of the Xablu team, we wish you a great 2022!

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Building a Christmas tree with .NET 6

Sebastián Pérez — Wed, 22 Dec 2021 16:17:51 +0000

It doesn’t matter if this year you were a good kid or not since Santa Claus gave us some improvements and news about the .NET platform. Let’s create an imaginary Christmas tree with the last news on the .NET platform:

1 – .NET 6: The star that adorns the tip of the Christmas tree. The new version of this open source framework that have many features as unified common base libraries and SDK, support for Apple Silicon (Arm64) and long-term support. You can read more on what’s new in .NET 6 in this link.

2 – .NET Upgrade assistant: It can be considered an ornament, an accessory for the Christmas tree but an important one. This application reduces the time and difficulty of updating projects in older versions of .NET. It is very well explained and very easy to run, and it supports multiple project types even .NET 6. You can explore the tool in this link.

3 – Hot Reload: This would be like the colored lights surrounding the tree. It really is something that cannot be missed because it prevents you from redeploying the application every time you change something in the code: “Less time restarting, more time coding”. It is not only available in Visual Studio but also through the command line. Learn more in this link.

4 – C#10: The code of C# is the leaves of our tree. A fundamental component of the platform since it is the most used language (you also can program is F# and VB.NET). My favorite improvement are the implementation of global using and file-scope namespace since they are time-saving: write once, use a lot. More info in this link.

5 – Minimal APIs: This functionality is the Christmas cookie. Now we can build cloud native APIs in a single file. If you want to know more you can read this post.

What is your favorite? Would you add any more to the Christmas tree?

Xablu team wish you a merry Christmas !

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.NET Status 2021

Sebastián Pérez — Tue, 14 Dec 2021 16:09:26 +0000

The year is almost over and I think it’s good to do a review of how the .NET environment is currently doing. Let’s first take a look at what the .NET universe looks like:

The big picture is not different today from 2020 but is definitely close to be as it is in the image. We can see that Xamarin is still appearing as a component. Would it be there next year ? .NET MAUI is also included as a DESKTOP component, interesting considering that you can develop desktop applications for Windows with UWP and for Mac with Catalyst.

Another highlight is how the community has been maintained and even increased this year:

These metrics show that it was right to approach the Open Source community. 7000 contributors is a lot ! What do you think ? Will it be bigger next year? Could be 7001 if you contribute !

Despite all this huge change that looks very complex, the performance has improved significantly, especially related to the data model connection with the Entity Framework:

While it’s not the fastest language it has huge potential for improvement and I think it’s going to scale a lot in the coming years. Did anyone believe that it could be compared to Node.js ?

At last, I will mention the release of Visual Studio 2022 that although it doesn’t introduce a huge change is important to build applications with .NET 6:

The previous version was released in 2019. We have in general a new version every two years, but this time it was 3 years. Will we have another version in 2024 ?

I’m really excited about these metrics as I see a stable community-supported platform to create all kind of applications. Next time, I will show you some of the new technical features that were introduced in this 2021.

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.NET Conf 2021: Updates in .NET MAUI

Sebastián Pérez — Wed, 24 Nov 2021 13:13:08 +0000

In the previous post I shared the videos that I recommend to see of the conference, however we didn’t see anything on .NET MAUI. Why? First because I was planning to do it in this post, but mainly because we are still in a preliminary version of this new .NET component and there weren’t many announcements.

To start, if it is your first approach to .NET MAUI I recommend you to read this post and watch this video of the conference:

A very interesting functionality that was presented is to use the controls already known in Xamarin Forms but a drawn version instead of its native version:

Blazor + MAUI: We can write web applications with Blazor in the same way as we did before but adding the chance of deploy them also on mobile devices:

Finally I here you have some updates related to one of the most used libraries which was created and maintained by the community: (Former Xamarin Community Toolkit) .NET Maui Community Toolkit

Although there were no big announcements, this point helps us to catch up and be ready for when the stable version comes out next year. Stay connected !

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.NET Conf 2021: 5 videos you have to see

Sebastián Pérez — Thu, 18 Nov 2021 04:22:01 +0000

The new version of .NET was released and the best place to present it is the most important conference that this platform has: .NET Conf. The conference was held over 3 days and had more than 100 speakers from around the world. And as I mentioned in the last post, I had the honor of being as a speaker

The conference had several topics of interest related to the launch of .NET 6 of which I will recommend 5 videos you have to see:

Keynote: General overview on what’s new including some very interesting metrics.

2. What’s new on C#: Details on this new version of the most used language in .NET.

3. .NET Hot Reload: Something familiar to Xamarin developers now applied to .NET.

4. Minimal API: Don’t forget to read this post before !

5. Creating NFT with .NET: My talk about implementing NFT on blockchain using .NET

You can see more videos on .NET playlist: dotNET – YouTube

Unlike the previous version (.NET 5) this new version shows a remarkable level of improvement and stability. I’m really excited about the idea of starting to develop with this platform. What do you think? Are you excited?

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.NET Conf 2021 is coming

Sebastián Pérez — Tue, 09 Nov 2021 16:58:32 +0000

As every year there will be a new edition of the most important .NET conference in the world: .NET Conf. This year will feature two tasty ingredients: the release of .NET 6 and … my first participation in the event

The conference will be held from November 9th to 11th and will focus mainly on what is new that introduces .NET 6. Also, it will introduce Visual Studio 2022 that has been recently released and we can see some news about .NET MAUI (preview 10). If you want to know more about the topics that will be presented I invite you to read these posts:

You can follow all the news of the event in the following link: .NET Conf 2021 (dotnetconf.net)

Finally, I invite you to be part of my presentation on “Creating NFT with .NET” next Thursday 11th at 6 am (PT) / 10 am (ARG) / 2 pm (NT). See you there !

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Say goodbye to XamExpertDay

Sebastián Pérez — Fri, 05 Nov 2021 17:29:03 +0000

Last month there was an event that brings us a lot of content in the world of Xamarin: XamExpertDay 2021. Because of the global context, this year as last year was held virtually and was attended by Microsoft technical leaders and developers with a lot of experience in the world of Xamarin. Another curious fact is that it will be the last edition of the event at least with this name because Xamarin will be formally incorporated into .NET with the release of .NET 6.

This edition was particularly special because topics related to .NET MAUI have already begun to be seen. If you are interested in the subject we highlight these talks:

Building Your Next .NET MAUI App – David Ortinau
Building Accessible Apps with .NET MAUI – Rachel Kang
Drawn controls in .NET MAUI – Javier Suárez Ruiz

And if you want to understand better what it is about first check out this post.

There really was a great level of talks with very curious topics such as handling a hand sanitizer with a mobile application. I was also struck by the talk of comparing MVVM and MVU patterns as it is a topic that is being analyzed for the next versions of .NET MAUI.

We at Xablu really like these events, and we’re looking forward to the .NET Conf next week. And maybe we’ll have some surprises for that conference. Stay tuned !

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What’s New in Xamarin Forms 5?

Sebastián Pérez — Fri, 20 Aug 2021 13:53:57 +0000

It was 2019 when the launch of .NET 5 was announced at the annual event for developers (Microsoft Build). At the same time, it was announced that all platforms would be integrated into one. This integration included Xamarin as part of the .NET platform, something expected since Microsoft had acquired the framework. This also implied the appearance of a new Framework within .NET known as “MAUI” (Multi-platform App User Interface) as a replacement for the well-known Xamarin Forms.

Unfortunately, the epidemic of the year 2020 caused this integration to be delayed to be included in the launch of .NET 6 scheduled for November 2021. So what happened to Xamarin in 2020? Xamarin Forms 5.0. To understand the impact of this new version, I prepared a list of new features and improvements:

Brushes: We now have different strokes to simulate what it would be like to paint with a brush. Available styles are Solid, Linear Gradient and Radial Gradient. More info
CarouselView: This visual element (that was already available as a preview)represents a set of views that are navigated in the form of a “carousel”. More Info
Drag and drop: This gesture is widely used in web development: we can “drag” objects over a view to execute events. More Info
IndicatorView: This control is attached to the CarouselView that allows us to identify which view of the carousel we are currently in and allows us to navigate directly to another view. More Info
Radio Button: Another control that was widely used in web development. Allows you to select a value from a set of values. They can also be customized using templates. More Info
Shapes and Paths: A new type of view that allows us to give them a new shape as circles, triangles or polygons. We can also combine them with the brushes for the borders and fill. More Info
SwipeView: A new type of view that works as an expandable menu by a swipe gesture. Currently widely used in applications to view emails. More Info
UIWebView: This is a change required by Apple to continue using WebViews in iOS environment. Xamarin Forms now uses WKWebView instead of UIWebView. More info

Other features that were announced alongside Xamarin Forms 5 that may be relevant are:

Hot Reload 2.0: A new version of the hot reload that works better and also supports UWP. More Info
Deploy iOS from Windows: now it is possible to test on iOS devices from Windows without being connected to a mac. More Info

As we can see, Xamarin Forms 5 brought us many new features but none of them are impressive. It is understandable as work is underway on integration with .NET and the release of MAUI. This makes us ask the question: is Xamarin Forms 5 worth it or is it better to wait for MAUI? We will be analyzing this in the next posts.

The post What’s New in Xamarin Forms 5? appeared first on XABLU.

10 Things You Should Know About Xamarin

Sebastián Pérez — Thu, 06 Aug 2020 15:25:13 +0000

Xamarin is used to create amazing cross-platform mobile applications! Did you know that cross-platform means you can actually share classes across .NET platforms?

Our colleague Seba takes center-stage to explain 10 different things you should know about Xamarin. He shares some core definitions for Xamarin, as well as how to use it in practice:

Here is a summary of the ten points Seba described:

You can create amazing applications using .NET as a platform. You can write C# code, as well as F# code. Basically, you can write everything you want using .NET as a platform.
Creating a library with Xamarin using .Net Standard, means you can share this library with other platforms, such as .NET core. Therefore, you can reuse your libraries.
The combination of the .NET environment and Visual Studio means you can write your application on both Windows and Mac machines.
Xamarin is cross-platform! You can share modals, classes and logic functionality across all the platforms, such as Android, iOS and Windows. In practice, you can share 75% of your code!
Xamarin will compile your application as native: there is no additional layer between Xamarin and your application. Your application will have native controls and native performance! Also, this allows you to use all the functionalities your devices offer.
In the traditional approach, you will have different projects with different views for each platform. However, Xamarin.Forms actually does allow you to share views across platforms as well. In Xamarin.Forms, you can write XAML views. It will still include native controls in the different platforms. Tip: take a look at Xamarin.Forms if you want to work with Xamarin for the first time.
Xamarin Essentials allows you to add device functionality, such as GPS, to your Xamarin.Forms projects. Xamarin Essentials is included with the Visual Studio application you need to install to start working with Xamarin.
Xamarin is open-source: you can find all the code in GitHub! There are more than 60.000 contributors: a real big and active community which we cherish at Xablu a lot!
There is a great community working with Xamarin. There are a lot of videos, blogs and youtube channels to find the information to learn about using Xamarin.
Xamarin is free! It has no licenses for commercial use! If you want to publish your apps, you do have to pay the platform subscription, such as for Apple or Android, but you never have to pay a fee for using Xamarin.

What is your favourite point on this list?

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Onboarding Remote Colleagues – Learning From the Best

Sebastián Pérez — Thu, 02 Jul 2020 09:14:20 +0000

Onboarding remotely: it is not always a choice anymore due to the current COVID-19 situation. But, especially in these times, onboarding cannot be forgotten or cut back on. In our previous posts, we highlighted the importance of team and personal guidance to make the onboarding process a success. However, the onboarding process also needs to provide insights on how practical work is done. With the current state of the art, it is easy to share documents, code and projects digitally. However, every work culture has developed their own ways of working, and, while many companies might use tools and platforms such as GitHub, the way the work has been organized can vary a lot.

Moreover, how do you get to know a codebase of an existing project you have been assigned to? In this case, personal guidance is also the answer, with a little help from Visual Studio Live Share.

Visual Studio Live Share

Visual Studio is an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) created by Microsoft that is used to develop all kind of applications including Desktop, Web and Mobile. We also have a light IDE called Visual Studio Code: on one hand, it is limited, but on the other hand it is really flexible and extensible. Both IDEs support this feature called Live Share, which is integrated in the regular version and works as an extension in Visual Studio Code. With Live Share, you can work on the same project at the same time with your colleagues. This is not just limited to coding on the same page, but also includes debugging together, sharing terminal (command line) and servers (localhost). In the last Microsoft Build event (link to previous blog post) a new feature was announced: audio calls.

Currently, the most used practice in companies outside of this new feature is to share your screen in a voice call, which works well for certain onboarding processes like showing how work is organised. However, it is not interactive since there is just one person in charge of making changes in the projects and, therefore, less suitable for getting a new team member involved in a new codebase. With Visual Studio Live Share, all of the attendees are able to modify the documents. Moreover, if you don’t have Visual Studio installed, you can still share your session since it is compatible with Visual Studio Codespaces, which works in the Azure cloud and can be used from the browser.

Do you have a new mate in your company? You can work together for the first week, it a very effective way to show how your work is and also, introduce yourself since you can do audio calls now.

The onboarding process is challenging, especially when it is remote. How do you ensure a new colleague feels at ease, accepted and integrated within the work environment when there is always a screen in between? It provides some challenges, but onboarding is an extremely important element of creating the initial bonds and first impressions. Therefore, it requires effort and energy, but remote also provides new opportunities like the additional learning features Visual Studio Live Share has. Other parts, such as getting to know the team and guiding the new colleague through their first weeks, are vital to include as well.

How have you been handling onboarding remotely?

<- Read our previous blogpost about Onboarding Remote Colleagues: Getting to Know the Team!
<- Read our previous blogpost about Onboarding Remote Colleagues: Guiding the New Colleague

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