Planet Xamarin Archives - 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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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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.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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.NET MAUI: Implementing platform behavior

Ruud Kobes — Fri, 17 Sep 2021 15:16:07 +0000

.NET MAUI is right around the corner. Like its predecessor it offers sharing most code while building for multiple platforms. This includes the UI part. Of course there are still elements that require access to the platform, like accessing the camera, or something less common like customizing HttpMessageHandler behavior on iOS.

For common use-cases Xamarin.Essentials was offered to Xamarin Forms users. Now with MAUI this library will be included in your application by default (named MAUI Essentials), making it easy to use SecureStorage or implement permissions on Android and iOS. Additionally there is a MAUI Community Toolkit which, as the name implies, provides free tools: effects, converters, controls and more.

Manual platform implementation

In some apps .NET MAUI with the Essentials pack and the Xamarin Community Toolkit can be sufficient. For most apps though, there is a point where some custom adjustment is necessary. A good example would be control adjustment using Handlers or Effects. We’ll describe Handlers and their value in more detail in a future blogpost.

There are several ways to go about defining platform specific behavior in MAUI. Because of multi-targeting the code will be in the single shared project. With Xamarin Forms this was also possible using the Shared Project architecture, but the recommended and most common approach was using a PCL and implementing platform behavior using dependency injection. Let’s run through some options!

Using #if

To add a few lines of platform-specific code to an otherwise shared class we can use compiler directives like #if __IOS__. This is a quick and easy solution and keeps the related code close together, in the same file. For smaller handler mappings this could be a nice and easy to manage approach. It could also make Effects easier, because we don’t need the routed effects and DI registration of every platform implementation. With larger sections of platform-specific code this can get messy and harder to read though.

				
					//SecureSettingsProvider.cs

namespace MyApp.Settings;

public class SecureSettingsProvider
{
    public string GetSecureSetting(string context, string key)
    {
        return GetLocalSetting($"{context}-{key}");
    }

    private string GetLocalSetting(string contextSpecificKey)
    {
        #if __IOS__
        // retrieve value from secure storage / keychain
        #elif __ANDROID__
        // do the same for android
        #endif
    }
}

Using platform folders

MAUI projects using the single project structure will provide platform folders out-of-the-box. They will be compiled conditionally by default, e.g. the Android folder will only be included when building for Android. Within this option there are still 2 distinctive approaches:

Dependency injection using interfaces

Like the old-school Xamarin Forms pattern, using an interface in the cross-platform code, and explicit implementations in each platform folder. Any logic that could be shared will have to be copied between the implementations, although to make it slightly more complex, one could also define a cross-platform base class.

Partial classes

Partial classes are not a new concept in C#. Check the docs if you want to read more about them. We can define one cross-plaform partial class and another partial class with the same name and namespace in each platform folder. This is a pretty clean alternative to using #if directives when working with larger classes/code sections. A potential disadvantage of this approach is that both partial classes live quite far-away from each other, which could hinder discoverability and increase cognitive load, if there is a lot of shared code. If the partial class has little shared code, the experience is a lot like using interfaces.

				
					//SecureSettingsProvider.cs in shared code

namespace MyApp.Settings;
public partial class SecureSettingsProvider.cs
{
    public string GetSecureSetting(string context, string key)
    {
        var settingValue = GetLocalSetting($"{context}-{key}");

        // do some work that's shared between implementations
        if(String.IsNullOrEmtpy(something))
          return "nothing";
        else
          return settingValue;
    }
}

				
					//SecureSettingsProvider.cs in Android platform folder

namespace MyApp.Settings;
public partial class SecureSettingsProvider.cs
{
    private string GetLocalSetting(string contextSpecificKey)
    {
        // retrieve secure setting value for Android
    }
}

Using filename based conditional compiling

This pattern is used in the MAUI github repository itself. Concretely this again means using partial classes, but this time the platform specific implementation is defined in the same folder in a separate file. For example for our SecureSettingsProvider, we would have a partial class in SecureSettingsProvider.cs and another one in SecureSettingsProvider.Android.cs, SecureSettingsProvider.iOS.cs , etc.
A potential advantage of this is that platform implementations are directly next to the shared part, which improves discoverability and can reduce cognitive load.

This approach is not supported out of the box though. The compiler needs to be informed which files to include or more accurately, which NOT to include, so we need to add this information to our project file. For an example of how this could look, see the first +-30 lines in MultiTargeting.targets file in the MAUI repository. The following sample is taken from line 2-7 there and slightly adjusted:

				
					<ItemGroup Condition="$(TargetFramework.StartsWith('Xamarin.iOS')) != true AND $(TargetFramework.StartsWith('net6.0-ios')) != true AND $(TargetFramework.StartsWith('net6.0-maccatalyst')) != true ">
  <Compile Remove="**\**\*.iOS.cs" />
  <None Include="**\**\*.iOS.cs" Exclude="$(DefaultItemExcludes);$(DefaultExcludesInProjectFolder)" />
</ItemGroup>

This ItemGroup definition informs the compiler to ignore all *.iOS.cs files in the project unless the current build target is Xamarin.iOS, net6.0-ios or .net6.0-maccatalyst. Similar project configuration can also be used to allow for custom platform folders thoughout the code:

				
					  <Compile Remove="**\iOS\**\*.cs" />
  <None Include="**\iOS\**\*.cs" Exclude="$(DefaultItemExcludes);$(DefaultExcludesInProjectFolder)" />

Which option is best?

As always in software development, the answer here is “it depends”. For multitargeting libraries, like MAUI itself, it is likely a good option to look at the the filename or nested folder approach we discussed. With a little project setup this allows you to group code by functionality, keeping related code close together.

For apps, it depends on how much platform-specific code really needs to be written. For some apps only a few adjustments may be needed using Effects, Behaviors and handler mappings. It is very possible for these to be only a few lines which allows for keeping everying in one file using #if directives. If these grow it is convenient to use the existing platform folders. In both these alternatives you can forego the need to use interfaces and register the platform services for dependency injection which can be convenient.

Please note that we’ve been looking at these patterns fairly strictly from MAUI perspective. Of course it is possible that you prefer to use interfaces to making testing and mocking easier. In that case you will be setting up the DI container anyway. It may still be easier to register one implementation and use above options, instead of registering every platform service separately, but keep in mind your overall architecture before choosing any of these patterns.

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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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Meet the Developer: 5 questions for our newest developer Luuk Jongebloet

Sabine Alberts — Mon, 22 Jul 2019 08:24:29 +0000

A few weeks ago, Luuk Jongebloet, officialy became a team member of Xablu’s Xamarin Development team. We’ve asked Luuk to answer a few questions. Curious about Luuk? See his interview below!

What brought you to Xamarin development and where do you want to go with it?

For me it all started some time ago, in 2015, with the development of a smartwatch application. This whole process of creating fascinated me. Seeing something rise and evolve every time you adjust the code makes my job fun and lively.

As a developer I want to be able to create many iOS and Android applications which result in an easier and beneficial life for the end-user.

What’s the coolest thing you have ever been working on regarding development?

That must be the creation of an AI robot car which is able to imitate a train! This specific “train” is following a set track, and while it goes, it is picking up people from set stations. That sounds like some cool stuff right?!

What has your experience at XABLU been like so far?

Xablu, in its essence, is a group of carefully handpicked Xamarin professionals. All with very high expertise in my opinion. Being a part of this team is great. Next to that, being a team member, also enables to learn a bunch of new things from my colleagues all the time.

How do you like to spend your free time?

I like to spend my free time with either gaming, working out in the gym, and of course some quality time with friends has never hurt anybody.

What’s your favourite food?!

I can’t say for certain since I like á LOT of food! But lately I do like to eat ramen. Ramen is a Japanese dish, very salty, and mainly consisting of wheat noodles.

Good luck to Luuk from the whole team!

We’re always happy to grow our team with eager developers interested in working their hand at real app projects.

Curious how Xablu can help your organization ?

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Welcome to Damiano Patane, our newest developer!

Kasia Krzyzanowski — Fri, 03 Aug 2018 09:45:18 +0000

We’re happy to have a great new developer join our team, Damiano! We asked him a few questions to get to know him better…

1. Tell me a bit about yourself as a developer:

I’m Damiano Patane, 25 years old, and I am from Alkmaar but will soon be living in Amsterdam. Since childhood I’ve had a passion for technology and computers, so I logically started studying Computer Science. I have a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Haarlem, where I did a specialization in Mobile Development and Game Development (games for smartphones).

I then did an internship in China where I developed mobile applications that helped with the care of elderly people, followed by my graduation thesis where I did security research for the Gentzz dating application on Android.

After completing my studies, I discovered my passion for creating mobile applications and launched myself as a Mobile Developer. Mobile applications can have a huge impact on daily life, for example, how Uber has had a major impact on the taxi industry. With the belief that in the future everything will become more mobile and we will be less and less bound to computers or laptops, I want to continue to focus my passion on creating mobile applications.

2. What do you like to do in your free time?

After work I’m usually running/jogging or working out in the gym, almost daily. Sitting behind a PC all day writing code is a physically lazy job, so I want to make up for that. If I have any time left I usually like watching shows and movies or playing some games. On the weekend I’m always out with friends.

3. What will you be doing for XABLU?

I’m a Junior Mobile Developer with experience in both native and cross-platform development. Currently, I’m helping out Minibrew with their Xamarin iOS application alongside my colleague Bart Kuipers and in the future I’ll be taking on other projects as well.

4. What has your experience at XABLU been like so far? What are you looking forward to?

I started a month ago and have been having a great experience so far! I like my colleagues at XABLU and I feel I fit right in at Minibrew. I love that I’m learning a lot, not just from creating their app, but also about communicating with the Minibrew machines, which is a more complex architecture than usual.

Interested in joining our team?

We’re currently looking for new developers from Junior to Senior. If you’re interested in or experienced with Microsoft Xamarin and want to be part of awesome projects, check out our open positions!

Curious how Xablu can help your organization ?

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