Industry Events Archives - XABLU

Xablu Team participates in the Monkey Conf

Juan Sturla — Fri, 03 Dec 2021 14:59:23 +0000

This week, on the first day of December, it was the fourth edition of Monkey Conf.

Monkey Conf is a .NET related event, the biggest held in Spain. This edition and the one from the year before were online conferences because of the pandemic situation.
While this might sound as a downside, it was a great opportunity for them to go global, allowing not only viewers from all around the world but also speakers.

The talks

Even though the event is oriented to .NET, all the talks were about mobile: Xamarin and .NET MAUI.

After the event’s Keynote, our fellow Sebastián Pérez was the first speaker.

He talked about what you need to know to get started with .NET MAUI: from how Xamarin became .NET MAUI, what tools to use or if you should wait until it’s release and more!

You can watch his talk in the video below:

But Sebastián was not the only one of our team who participated in the event, I was there too for the second talk.
Mine was about writing platform-specific code for your .NET MAUI applications. In this session you will learn what it is, why should you use it and different ways of implementing it with some code samples.

You can watch my talk in the video below:

There were other talks by great speakers, make sure to check them out!

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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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MyGalileoApp – Two Xablu mentored teams under the final 10!

Sabine Alberts — Wed, 21 Aug 2019 08:07:01 +0000

The Xablu Participation

The ten projects in the MyGalileoApp competition judged to be the most exciting in terms of their level of innovation, market potential, and technical feasibility are finally revealed!. Selected from 30 projects shortlisted for the competition’s first development phase, these 10 projects will now advance to the second development phase, at the end of which they should deliver a fully functioning app. Two of the 10 finalists were mentored by Xablu.

Photo: ©GSA, ©European GNSS Agency

Trukatu and Henk Kok: The Smart Navigation and Infotainment innovation category

The Smart Navigation and Infotainment innovation category account for three of the 10 finalists. The Ready Park app (France), GALILEONAUT (France) and the Trukatu app (Spain) which is a mobile C2C platform that connects people who want to rent or lease items with owners who have items to rent out. Trukatu enjoyed the mentoring and guidance of Xablu Co-Founder Henk Kok.

Photo: ©GSA, ©European GNSS Agency

LetMeAut and Maaike Dokter: the Fitness, Sport and mHealth category

Two of the shortlisted projects fall in the Fitness, Sport and mHealth category. The first of these – PanPan – Possible Assistance Needed (Germany) and LetMeAut (Italy) – makes everyday tasks easier for people with autism. Our team is proud to have had our Solution Advisor for Mobile Healthcare Maaike Dokter supervising LetMeAut towards their positioning under the top 10.

The other five

These four of the 10 shortlisted projects are in the Augmented Reality and Games innovation category: uMaze (Finland), ARGEO (Italy), STPR (Poland, Australia, Ukraine) and arstory (Germany). Finally, the Mapping, GIS and Agriculture innovation category accounts for one app among the top ten shortlisted projects: Tractor Navigator (France).

High standards leading to the hard competition!

We are proud to not have one but two of our experts contribute to the team’s developments and achievements in this very high-standard and hard competition.

“The standard of entry in this year’s competition was very high, which made the judges’ task a difficult one. However, the final 10 projects stood out in terms of their innovative approach and uptake potential and we are looking forward to seeing the final working apps in October,” said Justyna Redelkiewicz Musial, in charge of LBS and IoT market development at the European GNSS Agency (GSA). “We hope that the 20 projects that didn’t make it into the second development phase will continue to develop their apps because, at the finals, they will also have the opportunity to demonstrate the progress that they have made,” she said.

The Clock is ticking!

The 10 projects selected for the second development phase will have until October 21 to deliver a finalized version of their app with 100% functionality. During this phase, the teams can receive technical support from the competition’s technical and business advisory team. At the end of the phase, the application should be already available for download on the Google Play and Apple platforms.

Receiving the reward they deserve!

All teams that will successfully complete the second development phase will be invited to the finals, to be held on November 2019, where they will present their application to the GSA evaluation board. The awards will be decided after these presentations, with the first-place winner receiving a EUR 100,000 prize. The runner up and third place winners will receive EUR 50,000 and EUR 30,000 respectively.

Read this: Galileo Demo Centre Hanoi – only a few spaces left!

Media note: This feature can be republished without charge provided the European GNSS Agency (GSA) is acknowledged as the source at the top or the bottom of the story. You must request permission before you use any of the photographs on the site. If you republish, we would be grateful if you could link the article to the GSA website (http://www.gsa.europa.eu).

Curious how Xablu can help your organization ?

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XABLU signs Partnership Agreement Xamarin training with Web Age Solutions

Sabine Alberts — Thu, 01 Aug 2019 08:16:35 +0000

Toronto, Canada: XABLU is excited to announce that it has signed a partnership agreement with leading Toronto-based training provider Web Age Solutions. XABLU’s experienced Xamarin University-certified trainers will deliver a full catalogue of multi-day Microsoft Xamarin courses to software developers in cities across Canada and the United States.

Xablu’s unique team made up of Senior and MVP level Xamarin experts is passionate about providing Xamarin training to both beginning and experienced software developers through meetups, conferences, student workshops, hackathons, in-house team training and coaching.
The partnership will see XABLU provide trainers and content for intensive two to five-day on-location courses, ranging from beginner level to more specialized topics such as Xamarin UI/UX based training, Xamarin Azure, Security and Testing, and Xamarin.Android or OS-specific training.

“Working with Web Age Solutions is a natural development for us, as we have been getting more and more requests to provide training for teams based in North America. This partnership lets us expand our reach across both Canada and the USA through a professional and highly-regarded training provider, while allowing Web Age Solutions to further broaden their offering,” says Henk Kok, CEO of XABLU.

With the full catalogue of Xamarin courses already available online, developers can easily select the dates and locations that suit them best. Courses can also be customized to companies’ needs and provided in-house on request, ensuring your people develop the right skill set for your organization

About XABLU: Founded in 2015, XABLU is a leading cross-platform Xamarin Premier Consulting Partner based in Hengelo, the Netherlands. With deep expertise in Microsoft Xamarin, it offers app development, consultancy and training to mid-sized and large companies and institutions around the globe.

About Web Age Solutions Inc.: Founded in 1999 in Toronto, Canada, Web Age Solutions provides technology training and mentoring to companies navigating the world of online business. Counting half of the top Fortune 100 companies as clients, it provides quality education solutions to businesses across a wide range of industries worldwide.

See the full catalogue of Xamarin courses available on Web Age Solutions’ website. Interested in working together? Get in touch with us!

Curious how Xablu can help your organization ?

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Insights: Xablu joins MyGalileoApp Mentor team

Maaike Dokter — Tue, 07 May 2019 08:51:08 +0000

Last week, we had the pleasure of presenting Xablu’s tips & tricks to the contestants of the MyGalileoApp Competition 2019 organized by the European GNSS Agency (GSA). The competition calls for creative mobile application ideas that could benefit from the precise positioning offered by Galileo. Now, the 30 selected teams will embark on the next stage of the competition where we, from Xablu, will act as mentors.

In 2016, the global navigation satellite system (GNSS), called Galileo, went live. It was created by the European Union through the GSA. Galileo can provide high-precision information on our location, which is crucial for daily life activities. Location is the driving force behind many domains such as logistics and transport, which are indispensable in countless sectors such as agriculture, automated mobility, and healthcare.

The MyGalileoApp Competition received 148 innovative application ideas. Of these applications, 30 teams have been selected to partake in the second phase of the competition. During this phase, the teams will be supported by mentors and Xablu is honored to provide some of these mentors for the contestants.

Xablu knows, like no other, how important it is to solidify a concept before starting to build an application. Only by ensuring the solution matches the problem, the usability matches the user and the application fits the context, the application has a higher chance of being adopted and delivering the impact it is meant to have. The GSA works with the same mission while linking space to user needs: “While constantly working closely with a broad range of stakeholders, we ensure that the EU satellite navigation systems are fit for purpose and continue to meet the needs of those who use them today and tomorrow.

Xablu offers the contestants a tailored mentorship on Participatory Design

By helping them work together with their users, their chances of building a successful application increases immensely. Together, we can determine their stakeholders, create a plan of action for testing their application and evaluate the usability. It might seem that this work will take away time from the actual coding of the application but executing this process will save the contestants a lot of coding work and, thus, time since many issues are solved prior to development.

Moreover, Xablu has the technical expertise to help contestants realize their applications. Xablu builds applications through Xamarin, which allows for creating one shared-code base. This way, applications can be built for Android, iOS, and Windows with native app features and a native app feeling, while reusing a large percentage of your code-base. This allows for very efficient cross-platform development.

We want to wish all of the contestants good luck with the development of their applications and we hope we can personally help them achieve great impact using Galileo.

Curious how Xablu can help your organization ?

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Inspiring tech and new connections at Google I/O Extended Luxembourg

Kasia Krzyzanowski — Fri, 19 May 2017 10:47:00 +0000

Kasia Krzyzanowski

esterday, XABLU hosted a Google I/O Extended event in Luxembourg City. A diverse crowd of tech enthusiasts came out to enjoy networking over pizza and drinks, followed by a live screening of the Google I/O 2017 keynote. The upbeat atmosphere was enhanced by the cool industrial-style venue The Office and the amazing weather. The keynote was full of surprises and exciting new products, for both developers and consumers. Here’s what we took note of:

AI-everything

Last year AI was introduced as the big ‘new thing’, this year AI got the overall focus. AI is now deeply embedded in all of Google’s products; from translation to photo sharing to a new ‘intelligent’ drawing tool, AutoDraw. The clear message was that AI holds amazing potential to help us in every part of our lives, and is now a main focus of Google in general. It’s Open Source TensorFlow software is the most popular software of it’s type on GitHub.[/cs_text][cs_text]

Actions on Google

While it wasn’t clear whether this was already available to developers, Actions on Google was an exciting new feature that takes away many steps of the ordering process, making the consumer experience for things like ordering takeout extremely quick and easy. Doing away with the need for setting up a new account and providing billing details with every new vendor, it has great potential the mobile commerce market.[/cs_text][cs_text]

Google Vitals and Kotlin

A big announcement for both consumers and developers with the new Android O was Google Vitals, which offers many new ‘under-the-hood’ performance improvements for Android devices. With the boot time now twice as fast, and apps running more quickly and smoothly, the user experience which be much higher. In addition to showing off some new developer features like the Profiler in Android Studio , Google also made a surprise announcement: Kotlin is now an officially supported language on Android![/cs_text][cs_text]

SuperChat

A new feature that got lots of developers excited was the launch of SuperChat for YouTube, which lets fans pay to post special comments that go beyond highlighted text and make it possible to physically affect the set of a live video. For example, a fan could turn on the lights or turn up the music while an act is performing. With an open API already available, we can’t wait to see what creative applications developers come up with![/cs_text][cs_text]

The Assistant

Google’s Assistant was introduced last year as part of the Allo chat app. After that it became part of the Google Home speaker. Voice activated, it can interact with you in a conversational manner. Google is taking this to the next level: soon you’ll be able to pay with Assistant, translate with the Assistant and integrate with 3rd parties. Also big news was the announcement that the Assistant is coming to iOS, taking on Siri.

Looking to 2018

With the amazing potential of all of the newly announced products and features from Google, we can’t wait to see how these develop and the new apps and services that will result over the coming year!

Curious how Xablu can help your organization ?

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Highlights of Build 2017: from Xamarin Live to Microsoft Graph

XABLU HQ — Tue, 16 May 2017 10:37:00 +0000

XABLU HQ

Is your head still spinning from all those announcements at Microsoft Build 2017? Ours are. This edition was made even more exciting because we were physically present at Build with our own XABLU booth!

XABLU Solutions Showcase

We used Build to introduce our Visual Studio extension called XabluCross for MvvmCross. Designed for developers who use MvvmCross as their architectural framework, it provides all kinds of cool functions that make life (for a developer) so much easier. Our colleague Mark Jonker manned the XABLU Solutions Showcase, which was right in the centre of the Expo Hub. There was a lot of interest around the extension and many new connections were made! Mark also took the time to check out a number of the presentations and demos, learning more about Xamarin Forms, shared C# logic and the future of Visual Studio.

Of course, back in the Netherlands, we also took the time to watch the keynote with the team. Beyond the fun, cool ‘gadget’ demos there were a few announcements on the Xamarin front that definitely sparked our curiosity.

Xamarin Live

The most impressive demo was probably the one for Xamarin Live. Xamarin Live is a tool that lets you run/debug your app directly from Visual Studio on an iOS device, without needing to have a ‘Mac device’ to build the app. It reminded me of other development tools that have implemented a so-called ‘hot reloading’ feature. The requirements for either developing on a Mac device or having access to a CI environment that can build iOS apps can be rather cumbersome, especially when a developer prefers using a Windows system over a Mac device.

Besides being interested in what this could potentially mean for the daily workflow of a Xamarin developer…we’re also *extremely* curious as to how they’ve managed to do this!

XAML Standard

Currently XAML is widely known as the declarative XML-based language to describe a UI. Xamarin also adopted XAML for their Forms implementation, but it differs from the implementation used in UWP.

During Build, Microsoft introduced the ‘XAML Standard’, a standardisation effort that will lead to a unified XAML standard. Right now it’s still a draft, but a formal release is planned for later this year.

Microsoft Graph

Launched in 2015, Microsoft Graph is of strategic importance to Microsoft. It enables developers to interact in a unified way with everything related to users: work, private life, content, services, etc.
They took this further this year by announcing services based on Graph that make it possible to work seamlessly between devices, while being aware of your timeline. The Microsoft Graph API opens up this kind of functionality to every developer, making it very easy to integrate it into your app.

To wrap it up…

This was an exciting edition of MS Build! Not only did Microsoft launch and demo a lot of interesting new technology, the XABLU team also introduced the XabluCross for MvvmCross Visual Studio extension at Build and received a lot of positive feedback. We can’t wait to see how the new developments pan out, and look forward to returning to Build next year!

Curious how Xablu can help your organization ?

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Looking forward to Google I/O 2017

XABLU HQ — Mon, 15 May 2017 10:32:00 +0000

XABLU HQ

Reminder: RSVP now for Google I/O Extended 2017 Luxembourg!

Every May-June, the annual developer conferences of tech’s big 3 take place: last week was Microsoft Build, this week it’s Google I/O time, and next month Apple follows suite with WWDC.

This year’s Google I/O festival is being held at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View for the second time in a row. Running from this Wednesday, May 17th to Friday, May 19th, the three days will be packed with news on Google’s (or Alphabet’s for that matter) product portfolio.

Let’s take a look at the things we’re most excited about:

Android O – Better battery life

Historically, Google has announced the new major version of its Android operating system at Google I/O. This year will see the release of Android O. As all Android versions are named after a dessert it could be ‘Oreo’, but we will only know for sure on Wednesday.

Android O looks like it will be a rather ‘under the hood’ release: there isn’t that much that will get users really excited, besides the usual refinements in certain areas like notifications. The biggest news however can be found ‘under the hood’: once again Google has made a serious effort to reduce the battery usage of mobile phones in daily use. There’s nothing more annoying than a phone that can’t last a day on a full battery. And although Google has improved this situation considerably over the last years, Android O will see another iteration of this point.

Project Treble

The second thing to look out for is ‘Project Treble’. One of the biggest issues in the Android ecosystem is its huge fragmentation: there are devices that run on (very) old Android versions and don’t receive updates anymore.

Especially in light of security concerns, this is a really bad situation and leaves a lot of consumers out in the cold. The main reason for this situation is simple: updating Android devices is an expensive exercise because of the way it’s structured. The biggest issue lies with the Linux kernel being used: silicon manufacturers need to modify a new release for their specific hardware and this requires serious time.

With Project Treble, Google tries to solve this by modularising the Android OS and separating the ‘OS framework’ from the low(est) level hardware layer which is called the ‘vendor implementation’. With this separation, it’s possible for device manufacturers to update the OS framework without the need to change the vendor implementation. Because of this simplification of the update process Google hopes to convince device manufacturers to continue updating devices with the latest versions of Android for a longer period of time.

We’ll need to wait and see how this will turn out in real life: Project Treble is only part of Android O and will not be available for older versions. And due to this existing fragmentation it will take Android O a long time to become the most used version of Android in the field.

Flutter

As Xamarin specialists we’re interested in anything that has to do with cross mobile platform app development. One of the more interesting Open Source projects is Google’s Flutter project: based on the Dart language it provides a framework to develop mobile applications for both iOS and Android from a single code base.

One of the interesting things about Flutter is that it uses its own UI language: it doesn’t use native widgets but instead promotes the usage of fully custom-designed UIs. It’s a different approach to others but interesting nonetheless. This is the first time Google is putting Flutter in the spotlight, so let’s see what they bring to the table!

Google I/O Extended 2017 Luxembourg

If you’re in Luxembourg, be sure to join us at our I/O Extended event at The Office on Wednesday, May 17th to watch the keynote with other developers, and get the chance to discuss what the announcements mean for mobile development.

Get more info and your (free) ticket here!

Curious how Xablu can help your organization ?

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