open source Archives - XABLU

Behind the scenes at the MvvmCross & Xamarin HackDay

XABLU HQ — Tue, 05 Sep 2017 11:29:00 +0000

XABLU HQ

This past Saturday, September 2nd, we hosted the MvvmCross & Xamarin HackDay at the TOBACCO Theater in Amsterdam. Generously co-sponsored by the .NET Foundation and Microsoft, it acted as the closing event of the two-week MvvmCross .NET Summer Hackfest, as well as an event to introduce Xamarin and MvvmCross to new developers.

Attendees were greeted by a red carpet at the venue, which had an industrial look and feel, but still felt warm and welcoming. There was a great turnout of Xamarin and MvvmCross developers, with some speakers and participants flying in from places such as Denmark, Switzerland and as far as Argentina!

The day started off with an introduction and keynote by Xablu developers Marc Bruins and Martijn van Dijk, who are also part of the core MvvmCross team. They outlined the roadmap for the project and its new core goal: to become THE MVVM framework used in .NET and Xamarin development!

Learning from the experts and the hackathon

Four lightning talks then followed, two by top MvvmCross contributors Nico Milcoff (on View Presenters) and Tomasz Cielecki (on Custom Bindings), and two by leading Xamarin experts from Microsoft, Mike James (on Connected Apps in Azure) and Laurent Bugnion (on Azure Functions), and were all enthusiastically appreciated by attendees.

With the level of excitement in the room raised, it was then time to kick-off the hackathon, which saw attendees evenly divided into two groups. The first group was made up of developers new to Xamarin and MvvmCross, who had the rare opportunity to learn directly from Mike James and Laurent Bugnion. The second group was made up of existing MvvmCross contributors and this group quickly put their heads down and got to work on open issues within the open source project. The result was 11 pull requests by the end of the afternoon, including new documentation on data binding and the .NET Standard, bringing the total to 57 pull requests made during the two-week Hackfest.

Finally, after all the hard work, it was time for a relaxed drink and socializing to close off the HackDay. Get a visual look at the day in the timeline below!

A timeline of #MvvmCrossHackDay in tweets:

MvvmCross Xamarin HackDay

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You’re invited to the MvvmCross event of the year!

Kasia Krzyzanowski — Wed, 23 Aug 2017 11:12:00 +0000

Kasia Krzyzanowski

The Xablu team is excited to be organizing the MvvmCross & Xamarin HackDay in Amsterdam on Saturday, September 2nd, 2017. This full-day event will bring together MvvmCross contributors and Xamarin developers from around Europe for a day of talks, socializing and coding!

We’re big fans and supporters of MvvmCross here at Xablu, using it to create our apps (through our free Visual Studio Extension, XabluCross) and encouraging our developers to contribute to the project. So we can’t wait to further spread the word and get even more people using it!

MvvmCross is a framework that helps you get the most out of the Xamarin mobile app development tool. It uses the Model-View-View-Model (MVVM) design pattern to allow you to share behavior and business logic in a single codebase across multiple platforms, letting you build pixel perfect, native UIs. The MvvmCross & Xamarin HackDay is the perfect chance to get to know this framework better and even to begin contributing to it yourself!

GET YOUR TICKET

Speaker Lineup

With the aim of closing the MvvmCross .NET Summer Hackfest with a bang, the event will feature speakers from the MvvmCross leadership team and high-profile experts from the Xamarin community.

Mike James
Xamarin Evangelist, Developer at Microsoft
@MikeCodesDotNet

Laurent Bugnion
Senior Global Cloud Advocate at Microsoft
@LBugnion

Tomasz Cielecki
Xamarin MVP, MvvmCross contributor
@Cheesebaron

Nico Milcoff
Xamarin Expert, MvvmCross contributor
@nmilcoff

Martijn van Dijk
Microsoft & Xamarin MVP, Lead MvvmCross contributor
@mhvdijk

Marc Bruins
Xamarin Consultant, MvvmCross contributor
@MarcBruins

The Schedule

Get ready for a packed day focused on MvvmCross and Xamarin! The morning will kick off with a keynote and series of lightning talks, followed by an afternoon hackathon aimed at both existing MvvmCross contributors and those new to Xamarin and MvvmCross. The first group will work together to achieve the Hackfest goals, while the second group will get the chance to learn how to use the tools with hands-on instruction from the experts. Finally, we’ll finish off with a relaxed afterparty, where you can meet other members of the MvvmCross community over drinks.

8:30-9:00
Registration and welcome

9:00 – 9:30
Introductory Keynote by Marc Bruins & Martijn van Dijk

9:30 – 11:00
Lightning Talks

Nico Milcoff – View Presenters in MvvmCross
View Presenters are one of the most important parts of MvvmCross. In this lightning talk we will explore how do they work and how we can use them to create pixel perfect apps that respect platform idioms and navigation systems.

Tomasz Cielecki – Create custom bindings in less than 15 minutes
Create bindings for your amazing custom views with the number one MVVM framework, MvvmCross. Achieve the best interoperability with the framework, allowing TwoWay bindings and more. All this in easy digestible steps in less than 15 minutes

Mike James – Connected apps in Azure
Creating connected mobile applications often require some form of backend infrastructure. In this session, you’ll learn how to reuse your existing .NET skills to build web services into your Xamarin apps, leveraging the power of Azure App Service. Whether you’re a new mobile developer or an experienced enterprise team lead, Azure App Service, and Xamarin give you everything you need to build better apps.

We’ll cover how to get started and deploy your first App Service, look at the .NET client SDK, as well as demonstrate other Azure services such as Azure Search. By the end of the session, you’ll have a solid understanding of how you can leverage the power of both Xamarin and Azure to create world class mobile apps.

Laurent Bugnion – Azure Functions and Xamarin
One of the most exciting recent additions to Microsoft Azure is called Functions and allows the developer to quickly build and deploy code to the cloud without complicated setup. Also dubbed “serverless computing”, Azure Functions can be triggered by timers, HTTP calls or database operations, and can communicate with other Azure services or mobile and desktop applications such as those made with Xamarin. In this lightning talk, Laurent Bugnion, Cloud Developer Advocate for Microsoft, will give you an introduction to Azure Functions and get you started with this exciting aspect of modern computing.

11:00 – 11:30
Breakout session – Getting started with MvvmCross

11:00 – 12:30
Hackathon

12:30 – 13:00
Lunch

13:00 – 17:00
Hackathon

17:00 – 19:00
Afterparty!

The location

The MvvmCross & Xamarin HackDay will be held at the amazing TOBACCO Theater in central Amsterdam. We’ll have exclusive use of the space, with drinks and food provided throughout the day.

Get your ticket!

Thanks to generous co-sponsorship from the .NET Foundation, we’re happy to bring this event to you free, so get your ticket before all the spots fill up!

Curious how Xablu can help your organization ?

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Connect(); // 2016 – Developer Tools recap

XABLU HQ — Thu, 17 Nov 2016 11:13:00 +0000

XABLU HQ

Tech Stuff

The first live demo given by Chris Dias and set the tone for the rest of the event. Chris gave a very nice demo of developing a Node.js project using Visual Studio Code running on a Mac. Then he deployed the software to a Docker container running in Azure.

Quite impressive, but besides that it literally embodied the tagline of the event: “for any developer on any platform“.

The next stars on the podium were both Visual Studio 2017 and Visual Studio for macOS. Both products see a lot of work done in further integrating the Xamarin toolkit to make mobile development very easy. It is clear that the next edition of Visual Studio packs a lot of new exciting features for developers in general.

The other impressive new launch was Visual Studio Mobile Center: a single web portal that holds all necessary ingredients for the serious mobile app developer: build, test, deploy, crash handling, statistics, authentication and database storage. All wrapped in a beautiful, elegant web interface. On top of that it has it’s own RESTful API, all documented by using Swagger. The open-source ‘virus’ has caught on big time inside MS

Strategic

The first guest on stage was Jim Zemlin, the executive director of the Linux Foundation. It was announced that Microsoft has joined the Linux Foundation as Platinum Member, and as such will get a seat in the board.

In line with that announcement was the news that both Samsung and Google have joined the .NET foundation. Samsung is going to use .NET Core as platform for upcoming Tizen TV’s. Google wants to make sure that .NET is a first-class citizen on it’s own cloud proposition.

Throughout all the announcements made and demos given one thing is clear: the direction taken a few years ago to focus one the hand on the cloud (Azure) and on the other hand provide developers with the best tools out there, no matter which language and operating system they run, is consistently executed and embraced. It also shows that the acquisition of Xamarin plays a crucial role in this.

At XABLU we’re pretty excited about what we saw yesterday. Our guys can’t wait to get hold of the stuff and build serious applications with it!

Curious how Xablu can help your organization ?

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.NET standard

XABLU HQ — Thu, 20 Oct 2016 10:10:00 +0000

XABLU HQ

The goal of .NET Standard is “one library to rule them all”, or more simply, one set of APIs that can be used across platforms without compatibility issues.

At the moment, developers targeting one of the .NET variants need to understand the underlying platform to be able to develop for it. What makes it even more complicated is that there are multiple platform and API versions. Currently, the best solution is to create a PCL (Portable Class Library) and use ‘Bait & Switch’ to switch out a set of interfaces (so called facades) with the actual native implementation. This works well for abstracting platform specific features, but for more common API’s such as XML, Networking, IO, or even Primitives or Collections, you just want these to be available through a standardized framework.

“.NET Standard solves the code sharing problem for .NET developers across all platforms by bringing together the APIs that you expect and love across environments: desktop applications, mobile apps & games, and cloud services,” writes Microsoft’s Immo Landwerth, in a blog post.

This doesn’t mean that all compatibility issues are gone, but it does give a consistency in APIs. This also means that the smallest API surface, which is .NET Core will be updated to work with all the other platforms, and even behave the same. For developers, this means they only have to create and maintain one base class library.

For .NET Standard 2.0 the major decision was made to revert to compatibility with .NET Standard 1.4, drop the extra API’s added in 1.5 and 1.6, and make sure that all the API’s in 1.4 work on all platforms! As a little bonus it will be built on .NET 4.6.1.

Curious how Xablu can help your organization ?

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MvvmCross Meetup

XABLU HQ — Tue, 04 Oct 2016 09:54:00 +0000

XABLU HQ

Over the last year we have been organising our monthly MvvmCross hackathon. Besides the socialising part and the famously good food the main ‘goal’ has always been to attract new contributors to the open source project.

While this has been successful and indeed PR’s from regular visitors have been accepted upstream, we feel the need to bring this to the next level and make this meeting more accessible to new-comers that are using MvvmCross in their daily work, but not necessarily have the ambition to contribute to the open source project.

So if you want to sit down with other developers, ask questions and share insights on using MvvmCross than you’re more than welcome to join!

Curious how Xablu can help your organization ?

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Microsoft’s TechDays 2016

XABLU HQ — Fri, 09 Sep 2016 09:27:00 +0000

Xablu

On the 4th and 5th October the annual Microsoft TechDays will take place in Amsterdam.

This year the XABLU team will be present to inform you about Xamarin mobile app development. Whether you want to talk about setting up a good app architecture or organising your mobile strategy: we’re the team that can help you realise your mobile targets!

We will be located at the Xamarin stand near the open podium. We also have discounts tickets. Send us a message and save some money!

Curious how Xablu can help your organization ?

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Microsoft releases .NET Core 1.0

XABLU HQ — Thu, 07 Jul 2016 09:44:00 +0000

XABLU HQ

When Microsoft introduced C# and .NET back in the day, at least the promise of a potential cross platform technology like Java was there. However, in those days we’re talking about ‘Microsoft 1.0’, were ‘run everywhere’ basically meant: ‘run on every flavor of MS Windows’. This narrow view, amongst others, resulted in C# and .NET only being used inside MS shops, and totally neglected in the ‘alternative universe’. Then Mono, an open-source, cross platform implementation of C#/.NET came along. But Microsoft’s (together with Novell, which at some point owned Mono) rather ambiguous stance resulted in C# being left alone by the majority of the open source community and companies that have a strong open source policy.

Lots have changed over the last years. We’ve witnessed the birth of Microsoft 2.0, which is in it’s latest form a huge open source supporter and contributor. Funny fact about Mono? It is now owned by Microsoft via its recent Xamarin acquisition.

So what about this release then? Why is this so important? It’s largely ignored by the big IT blogs and news sites, and (mostly) ridiculed by the open source community. But what we’re looking at here is the first version of a completely rebuild, truly cross platform, open source foundation for .NET/C# technology that really runs everywhere. Backed by one of the biggest IT companies in the the world. Sounds familiar? It should, as this is comparable with the promise of Java. And although there’s a lot of (sometimes overheated) debate about Microsoft’s ways, there is in general consensus on the technical merit of C# technology.

And yeah, on one hand it’s more limited than the full .NET stack, and on the other hand it’s still a little bit rough on the edges on Linux. But imagine where this could be going. I wouldn’t be surprised if C#/.NET will see a significant growth in the open source world, which is now mainly dominated by C/C++. And while Java is struggling under Oracle’s wings, C# and .NET have a bright future ahead!

Curious how Xablu can help your organization ?

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