Uncategorized Archives - XABLU

React Native

XABLU HQ — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 15:48:00 +0000

React Native is a JavaScript-based framework for developing cross-platform mobile apps and websites. With a single codebase, it enables the creation of native-like applications for both Android and iOS platforms. Leveraging native components, React Native ensures optimal performance and user experience. This language allows businesses to save time and resources by streamlining the app development process, resulting in faster time-to-market and cost-effective solutions.

The Rising Demand for Cross-Platform Apps In today’s market, businesses need to cater to a diverse user base across different platforms. Cross-platform app development has emerged as a significant trend, allowing organisations to reach a wider audience and maximise their app’s market presence. With React Native, businesses can capitalise on this trend and efficiently develop apps for multiple platforms, gaining a competitive edge in the ever-evolving digital landscape.

How we can help:

We are here to simplify cross-platform app development for businesses. Our expertise in React Native enables us to assist organisations in leveraging this language to its fullest potential. From project planning to deployment, our team ensures a seamless and efficient development process. By utilising React Native, we empower businesses to create high-quality, performance-driven apps that meet the demands of their users.

Improved productivity of development

Simplified Cross-Platform Development: React Native streamlines the development process, allowing businesses to build apps for multiple platforms simultaneously.
Code Reusability: With React Native, developers can reuse a significant portion of their codebase, resulting in faster development and reduced costs.
Native-like Performance: React Native enables the creation of apps with near-native performance, eliminating compatibility issues and ensuring a smooth user experience.
Real-Time Updates: React Native’s Live Reload feature facilitates real-time code changes, making debugging and updates seamless.

Exploring the Power of React Native

React Native is a powerful framework that revolutionises cross-platform app development. With its JavaScript foundation and native UI elements, it provides developers with a versatile toolset for creating efficient and user-friendly applications. By leveraging React Native’s features and capabilities, businesses can optimize their app development process, reach a wider audience, and deliver exceptional user experiences.

The language of React Native offers many advantages for businesses. By leveraging code reuse for both native and cross-platform apps, companies can save valuable time and resources, resulting in faster development cycles and reduced costs. This streamlined approach ensures a consistent user experience across different platforms, fostering customer loyalty and satisfaction. Moreover, the real-time update feature enables developers to make instant changes and fix bugs efficiently, leading to improved app performance and overall quality. With React Native, businesses can achieve efficient, cost-effective, and user-centric app development, empowering them to stay competitive in today’s market.

With our expertise in React Native, we provide comprehensive support to your development team. Through training and coaching, we empower your team to leverage the full potential of React Native and stay updated with the latest best practices. Additionally, we offer assistance in areas such as UX design and DevOps, including tools like SonarQube pull request decoration, to ensure a smooth and efficient development process.

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Flutter

XABLU HQ — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 11:19:00 +0000

Flutter is an open-source UI software development kit created by Google. It allows developers to build high-performance, visually appealing applications for various platforms, including iOS, Android, web, and desktop, using a single codebase. With Flutter’s reactive framework and extensive widget library, developers can create stunning user interfaces and deliver consistent experiences across devices.

In today’s market, organisations face a growing demand for multi-platform applications. Flutter addresses this trend by enabling businesses to develop and maintain a single codebase, reducing development time and costs. By leveraging Flutter’s reload feature, teams can iterate quickly, improving time-to-market and user satisfaction.

How we can help:

Our expertise in Flutter empowers companies to harness the full potential of this framework. We provide comprehensive support, from initial architecture design to development, testing, and deployment. By leveraging Flutter’s capabilities, we enable businesses to create robust, visually appealing applications that enhance user engagement and drive business growth.

Discovering Flutter’s Potential:

Enhanced Performance: Leverage Flutter’s native-like performance for smooth, responsive user experiences.
Consistent UI: Ensure a consistent look and feel across platforms with Flutter’s rich widget library.
Faster Time-to-Market: Develop quickly using Flutter’s reload feature, reducing development cycles.
Cost Efficiency: By building a single codebase for multiple platforms, Flutter helps optimise development costs.

A deep dive into cross-platform development:

With Flutter, developers can leverage a single codebase to create visually stunning applications for iOS, Android, web, and desktop. Its reactive framework and extensive widget library enable the building of beautiful, high-performance user interfaces. Flutter’s “write once, run anywhere” approach allows businesses to streamline development processes and deliver engaging experiences across platforms.

Discover the ins and outs of Flutter, a powerful cross-platform development framework. Learn how to maximise code reuse, create stunning UIs, and leverage Flutter’s reactive programming model. Dive into the extensive widget library and explore the performance optimisations that make Flutter an ideal choice for multi-platform development.

Flutter offers numerous advantages for businesses. It enables faster development cycles and reduces time-to-market, allowing companies to stay ahead of the competition. Flutter’s consistent UI across platforms ensures a seamless user experience, enhancing brand perception and customer satisfaction. Flutter’s performance optimisations result in smooth, responsive applications that captivate users, driving higher engagement and conversions.

With our expertise, we provide comprehensive support to your Flutter team. Our services include training and coaching to upskill developers, ensuring they make the most of Flutter’s capabilities. We also offer UX design assistance, helping create intuitive and visually appealing interfaces. Additionally, we provide DevOps support, including tools like SonarQube for continuous code quality improvement through pull request decoration.

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Swift

XABLU HQ — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 09:15:00 +0000

Swift is a general-purpose programming language built with a modern approach to safety, performance, and software design patterns. With its emphasis on safety, Swift eliminates common coding pitfalls and catches developer mistakes early on. It offers a concise and expressive syntax, making it a pleasure to work with. Swift integrates seamlessly with various development tools and supports interactive experiences, empowering developers to build robust and efficient software.

In today’s market, companies face the challenge of developing software that is not only reliable but also secure. With the increasing complexity of applications, the need for a language like Swift has become crucial. Swift provides a safer programming environment, reduces the risk of runtime crashes, and enables developers to write clean, maintainable code. By adopting Swift, companies can enhance their productivity, reduce development time, and deliver high-quality software.

How we can help:

We assist companies in harnessing the power of Swift to build reliable and efficient software solutions. With our expertise in Swift development, we provide comprehensive training, coaching, and support for teams. We offer specialised services in user experience (UX) design and DevOps, including tools like SonarQube for pull request decoration. Our goal is to empower our clients’ Swift teams and help them achieve their software development objectives.

Software development at a higher level

Improved Code Safety: Swift eliminates undefined behaviour and catches developer mistakes early, ensuring software reliability.
Enhanced Performance: Swift’s design and optimisation techniques enable fast and predictable execution, even for complex tasks.
Expressive Syntax: With its modern features and clean syntax, Swift makes code easier to read, write, and maintain.
Powerful Error Handling: Swift’s built-in error handling mechanisms enable robust error management and better code maintainability.

Programming Language for Today’s Needs

Swift is a programming language that offers a versatile and user-friendly approach to software development. It provides a range of powerful features while maintaining a concise and easy-to-understand syntax. With Swift, developers can take advantage of various capabilities such as closures combined with function pointers, numbers that allow multiple return values and generics for flexible code reuse. Swift also offers repeating ranges or collections, making it easier to work with data. Its support for structs with methods, extensions, and protocols allows for structured and modular code organisation. Swift embraces functional programming patterns like map and filter, enabling developers to write expressive and compact code. Swift includes advanced control flow constructs such as do, guard, defer, and repeat keywords, which enhance the flexibility and readability of code. Swift simplifies the development process and empowers programmers to create efficient and elegant software solutions.

Swift brings several advantages to software development. Its strong emphasis on safety ensures code reliability, reducing the risk of crashes and improving overall software quality. Swift’s performance rivals that of C-based languages, enabling developers to build fast and efficient applications. Swift’s modern and expressive syntax enhances developer productivity and code maintainability, ultimately resulting in shorter development cycles and higher-quality software.

We provide comprehensive support to your Swift team. Our services include tailored training programs to upskill developers in Swift, coaching sessions to guide teams in adopting best practices, and assistance in user experience (UX) design to create intuitive and user-friendly applications. Moreover, we offer expertise in DevOps practices, including tools like SonarQube for pull request decoration, ensuring the seamless integration of code quality and security measures into the development workflow.

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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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Introducing design thinking

XABLU HQ — Sat, 11 Sep 2021 18:15:56 +0000

You have probably heard about this before, but what exactly is Design Thinking?

Contrary to popular belief, design thinking is not related to design. There are 2 ways to view Design Thinking:

The first way is see it as a mindset, or an ideology, where you approach each problem from a user-centered perspective.

The second way is a six-steps process that helps us practice this ideology of user-centered design.

Why should we practice Design Thinking?

The whole idea of design thinking is to help translate ideas into solutions. Then, these solutions will lead to innovations and those innovations will result in a competitive advantage.

It’s about helping people and companies to think differently: to create a strategic vision centred around user necessities and their impact.

The concept of Design Thinking sounds great, but is not easy to introduce this mindset in a company.

How do we apply Design Thinking?

As we mentioned before, there is a six-steps process to use this methodology in practice:

1) Empathize with your users
2) Define the real problems
3) Ideate possible solutions
4) Prototype your ideas
5) Test them with your target users
6) Implement your idea

Although this process is presented as a linear process, it should be practiced dynamically. This means you need to adapt these steps throughout your process, based on the things you run into and need.

Our field has so many terms and processes already, so you may ask yourself:

Why should we introduce a new process?

The benefits of Design Thinking reach far beyond the process itself.

Design Thinking allows you to keep consulting tools such as persona’s prototypes or user journey maps throughout your process. You can always return to these tools to make sure you have a good understanding of your users and so you remember to prioritize your initiatives based on your user’s needs and wishes.

Also, Design Thinking is a great way to foster the collaboration between different people on different teams.

The next time you have to solve complex problems, prioritize initiatives, create a new product from scratch or maybe improve the user experience in a flow or process, remember that design thinking is the best way to keep the user at the center of each decision you make.

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