.Net Foundation Xamarin Community Standups, 1 Aug 2019

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From YouTube: Xamarin: .NET Community Standup - August 1st, 2019 - XAML Hot Reload with Alex Corrado

Description

Join the Mobile .NET Teams for our community standup covering great community contributions for Mobile .NET, Xamarin, Xamarin.Forms, Components, and more.

Suggest an idea for a standup: http://aka.ms/dotnet-standup-suggestion

Links: https://www.theurlist.com/xamarin-standup-aug1

A

Welcome back everyone to another, beautiful, wonderful xamarin, dotnet community Santa, Baum James, Monson, magno, how's it going everybody who do we got on the line? How to open these things anymore, I, don't know what to do. I said of podcast as a video show is that I don't know what's happening anymore, everybody.

B

Wants in we all want to be here, I want.

A

To be a well if you're brand news, the dotnet community Santa's, we do these puppies twice a week, asp.net on Tuesdays and all sorts of different great workloads on Thursdays xamarin, desktop tooling, with visual studio languages in runtime, I'm James, Monta Magnum of p.m. on the xamarin team and I have some of my best friends in the entire world with me: I'll. Let them introduce themselves. So, let's go I, don't know what you see. I'll go left to right and you guys can figure it out from there.

B

Well, I'm, looking at the screen, so I think I'm on the far left, so I'm David work, now program manager with mobile dev tools focused on the xamarin mobile SDKs, especially xamarin forms, but of course iOS, Android and components and in Boston hi.

C

I'm Mattie Legere I am a p.m. on xamarin and xamarin forms. Tooling, teams is bouncing back and giving away my surprise, which is my best friend in the world. Special guest alex Corrado hi.

D

I'm Alex, Corrado and I am the deadly Don zamarons upcoming hot reload feature for xamarin forms mo my.

A

Favorite feature is this team's feature, though you'll start to talk, and then it's like I, don't know. Okay, now we're over here where.

B

It's gonna be an interesting stand up with the way the cameras both teams wants to shift and that camera in the room. It's gonna, be bonkers. Amazing, yeah,.

A

And also Alex, you've been on the zamarons show before you did a bunch of stuff on the iOS designer yeah. He tell everyone a little bit about yourself a little bit more. Let's see the camera moves back to him so interesting out towards.

D

Yeah yeah, that's right, so I also work on the iOS, a designer, storyboard and zip designer and also on us, are a bit on our remoted similar for iOS. So I work on a few things, but I'm really excited about a hot reload, and that talk to you guys about that today. Super stoked, perfect.

A

Cool I love that the camera worked perfect next time, Maddie webcam a single webcam. Far back on that next week, we're gonna make a screaming.

C

A

It I know, can you sign.

C

It out webcam as far back as it goes in this room. It.

A

Is that's great yeah Alex just got you guys, gonna get uncomfortably close to fit, and it's also the team's thing right. Yeah.

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Right well, this way like no wait slide. This way a little bit there.

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You go to the your laughs, everybody's.

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We're streaming on the Donna Foundation YouTube, the xamarin YouTube, so a lot of people in the chat, the beach Carlos hi MA, Lewis, William John's in there I decided to stream everywhere cuz we use restream that IO and I, just all the streams, so we'll try to chat we're monitoring the chat room non-stop. So we will answer your questions but welcome everyone to the chat and to the twitch. Everything like that I like to see some of the emotes around my stream as well.

A

Thank you always appreciate that, and we do a few things on the stand-up. So we love to go over great community contributions that are happening across the globe, so not only with individuals blogging out there, which is really awesome to see, but also great pull, requests and issues that have come up on our open source projects and then, after that, we're gonna pass it off to Alex to talk about all the great new hot reload stuff, that's happening in the world of xamarin forms. So Maddy do you want to cover the community blog posts?

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This works. We have a bunch, as always I always say we have a bunch of blog posts, and then we really have a blunt, a bunch so scream one should be good right, hey yeah,.

A

Sure they're both sharing.

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C

Great, so we don't have a URL list for you folks today we're gonna get it up after, but all of the links you know just you'll be able to see them up here and then check Twitter or wherever we're gonna post it after to go through and click through all them. So the first thing I want to talk about the amazing xamarin developer summit that happened almost a month ago, which is really scary. It's already August in Houston Texas, and if you haven't heard of it, you didn't get the chance to go.

C

It was actually completely community driven so Dan, Siegel and and Claudio Sanchez from Avante Point and Meg sauce and David Orr. It now dared Dan to make a conference, and he did so. If you're they careful.

B

What you say to people, sometimes it just go, do it right right.

C

Exactly but it was completely community driven, there was a whole team, so it wasn't just those two I mean I were probably like twenty or thirty people who ended up helping out with it, and it was incredible. I was two days so non-stop action-packed. There were three talk simultaneously, both days from like 8:00 to 5:00 or something crazy, and there were live streams so they're all in this article on the xamarin blog. Oh, you don't have the scroll the same way that my scroll is.

B

Unacceptable and the dock is huge. Yeah talk, we're.

C

Screwed, so what I did here is I summarized the keynote for all you, so you don't have to watch the both our keynotes. All that you should, because they were great, you might see some familiar faces and there were a bunch of announcements. So James have taken everyone through all the stuff we're doing to make xamarin still 100% native 100% optimized. What you expect and then David talked about how we're making everything cross-platform and then I talked about some amazing features.

C

We were working on and we announced hot reload, which we'll talk plenty about later, so I'm not gonna, spend too much time on it yet and then, on the second day, Donovan brown came up and talked a lot about how you can make your mobile DevOps. Not a complete disaster with App Center and Azure DevOps, which were it was a fantastic talk, so definitely go watch. Those the links to the live streams are all the bottom and some of the presentation speakers were nice enough to upload on the Samer and developer summit.

C

Github whole bunch of stuff yeah.

A

We're gonna be working, so all of the Microsoft tracks are up there, they're in this blog post on the xamarin, dev blog and then also we have all of the other ones too from the conference. Now those will come out like a month or two. We have a lot of editing to do and a lot of things to to roll out and things like that, but they will becoming at some point so definitely subscribe to the Samer and developers. You do yes.

C

Very exciting, cool, ok, so that's the first one, let's hop over into I'm, actually going to change the order of this a little bit. Another thing that's going on is Samer and UI july, so we talked about this a little bit at the beginning of the month and the july community stand up, but I want to bring it up again. I don't know why your formatting go. Let me refresh this: is this edges fault? No much better? Okay, so this is Stephenson's.

C

I did it copies from luis mitosis xamarin month in February, and basically there's a blog post every day for amazing, UIs and xamarin. So you can go and look at all 31 blog posts, 31 and check them out. We have a bunch highlighted today, but it's right on Stephens blog definitely take a look lots of familiar faces and also lots of new faces too, which was really cool so.

B

They're doing a livestream later today, aren't they I think Oh.

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I'll tweet, it out will mask every tweet tweet.

C

It sweet ok, so next we have a blog from Denny. Denny has an awesome blog, it's all about accessible development, which I think is something we don't talk about enough at all, and and Denny had gone in used hot reload as part of the private preview, which we also have details coming for and I wrote this really nice blog.

C

This is pretty much bragging about all the great work that Alex did and the whole zamel hot reload team, but how you know you can how Denny you use high reload and the things that he did to make his app more accessible. So, yes and Denny also became an MVP today, thanks Lou, that's.

B

Super exciting yeah.

C

Congratulations.

B

C

Super great- and this is the best part David used shell and visual- some fantastic salmon forms features with hot reload, because it's great so definitely check out. Daddy's blog all of his posts are awesome, but this one in particular so back to xamarin. Oh my gosh. All these are weird this one's good, this one's good, okay. This is Kim Philpott, who I know we have highlighted before cuz Kim is amazing, with UI it especially Askia, stuff and Kim did I keep scrolling the wrong way this for the same reforms.

C

Ui challenge is his serious that he does with these day versus night mode in this really pretty app, and so a lot of this is skia. So if you're new to ski are just looking for how you can like stretch the limits with it, this is a great blog to look at this slider. He chose got to do this, which was really cool and very challenging, but it actually wasn't as hard as you'd think it was it's just as always right here in his in his code.

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So the background and like the animations and the clip path to make it like a little triangle, looking thing all this great stuff and then handling the actual user input of it. So it's super cool I'm, actually copypasta in this for uh I, don't even know what I'm working on something about choosing where we're gonna eat dinner, but I wanted my like roulette wheel to have something that looked like that, so very cool, very great samples and and Kim.

C

Does these all the time so really good to look at this is Randy's ex uber uber clone. So this came out I think like the day of the last community stand-up. So we had mentioned some of the things that Randy did previously in this series so like dropping the pin and making the path, but this one's actually building the whole clone, and it's actually not as long of an article as I thought it was going to be it wasn't. It was surprisingly not difficult to build uber in xamarin forms. So super exciting!

C

You get your fly outs. You got your circle images James, shout out all the different nice animations and fade ins, and all of that stuff so definitely check this one out. Sam boy, comm, fantastic lots of UI, stuff and cool tips like this. So and you can see all the all the other google maps articles down at the bottom of Randy's blog, sweet ooh, this one's cool, rapid prototyping, with xamarin forms. For so this was a clone of the Google Play app and its shell super.

C

And basically this is Alejandro and he takes us through like going through and setting up the shell to look like what you're gonna want it to look like for Google Play and then doing collectionview very exciting, which, if you haven't heard of that, that's the new, more performant ListView alternative for that we're coming out with, and one of the upcoming xamarin forms releases, I'm sure David will have some thing to say about it.

C

So I'm not gonna steal his thunder, and this is something I never see with shell stuff yet, which is super exciting, but it works. Really. Well is the search handler with shell so helping you search through like a lot of data and a really nice and easy way, and it's a really good, looking really good, looking clone, of course, on github, fantastic, alright! Next we have Almere more collectionview stuff.

C

So this is another xamarin UI July anything with this little badge on it, it'll it'll, let you know, but it's kind of a deep dive in a collection view what you can do with it, how it's you know like setting the flag, because it's experimental it is on if you're using shell, so you can go ahead and use it, and then all your different, like lists and grids that you can do with this collection view.

C

So something I learned about collection view a couple weeks ago, is that you can do two side by side list views which he shows you how to do here ah way down here. So it looks like a grid, but it's actually just a side by side collection view, and it deals with your data for you. So you don't have to do any weird like indexing or anything which is.

B

C

Fancy fancy fancy so the Wi-Fi code for just a second there, so I just heard Dave go.

B

Say too much, but you know I get so excited when I see things like this, so we also have some some prototypes that we're building out for or not prototypes, but some examples were building out for collection view in general, and one of them is a staggered list. So I'm excited to see that one come together. It's quite easy to do on Android a whole different story, I think on iOS. So it's coming along and it's a good example of how you can write your own custom layouts for collection view. That's.

C

B

Be documenting that further and providing samples but love.

C

It very exciting cool. Alright. Next we have Martin, and this is another math deemed one. We've had a lot of map stuff lately, oh, it's just cool and it's highlighting cheese, I'm! Sorry, Martin, I, love you but I'm, not gonna get your notifications, another UI samory new, a July one, and this one is highlighted in countries on a map using geo JSON. So I don't know if you have played sparkle, the quizzes where you like, typed in all the country names and it like filled, you had to guess all 195 countries or whatever.

C

But this reminded me so much of that quiz and it's it's actually like pretty simple zamel code that he wrote up and then the highlighting is just a couple couple stuff going on in the backend couple things and then getting your custom renderers, which he shows you how to do for you WP, android and iOS, and it's not a ton of code like 80 lines or so and then the logic talks you through the whole thing and in the end you get the sample app and the full source code and all the summary good buy him.

C

A coffee love those legs so definitely check this one out if you're trying to do any of this like map highlighting all custom renders, like the custom, renderers we're just easy to read through if you want to get an idea of how they work. If you're new to those two definitely check this one. Okay, five more Brian I want to wait. I want to save enough time for hot reload. You know right.

C

Okay, this one and I have seen our lovely friend here in the in the chat, hi, printing, PDFs and images with xamarin forms so going ahead and actually using a printer with xamarin and clicking into the like native print services on phones to make this happen so James. This isn't part of essentials. Yet is it oh good good.

A

Well, good make a pull request. I know.

C

The work has been done for you just sayin PR it up, that'd be great yeah and it takes you through the print services for iOS or Android this one's iOS and that's it and and of course the code is well architected. So you got your interface, so you got your service and then some some plugins by this guy I've, never heard of James something-or-other sound.

B

I think those are all now baked into essentials right current activity, media and permissions now.

A

B

Some of them well.

A

Current activity is technically in inside of it, but we don't expose it currently. uh Your.

C

A

Activity is a it's a it's a it's a it's! It's something that we've thought about, opening up it, but it's it's really only an Android API. So true, it's a it's a tricky one. In general, it's good for a few things like permissions is baked in for like if you use an API that calls permissions and yes, but we don't give you granular control over it. Necessarily you.

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Be like all request, a permission manually that is coming, though we're gonna make that happen. Okay, I just had a completely reaaargh attacked my permissions plugin to make it linker safe, which it did a whole blog post on which was really crazy. So all that work that I just did will come over into essentials, which is really fun and yeah current activity. I'm sure you could do some Swizzle to get to get access to the stuff, but.

C

A

Talk to John dick about maybe opening that one up it it's more for, like library, creators, it's nice and I'm, not just for forms used to have the contacts, but they got rid of the current context. I guess in the Android thing: didn't they? Oh no.

B

I think it's I think it's still there I.

A

Guess still there, but it's like deprecated technically could.

B

Be yeah we don't, we don't usually completely remove anything.

A

B

Don't don't open the floodgates I know as soon as I say, make a statement like that I'm looking at the chat waiting for somebody to be like well that one time you remove that one thing.

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C

This one, if you haven't heard about this yet and you do xamarin Mac apps, you need to you- need to pay attention for a second, so David wrote a blog post about this. No.

B

No I didn't I didn't write this blog post. Here's what happened! Oh Chris,.

C

B

The engineering lead wrote the blog post and we co-authored it, but the plugin that was allowing us to show two authors on the blog post got. It was a problem. It was slowing down the blog, so we removed it and my name stayed on there. So I get credit for it, but I didn't write. Really I mean this is Chris, so I don't want to take credit for something. I didn't fully do here and.

C

I know we talked about this a little bit on the last minute. Ii stand up, so you can also watch that video to see it out of Chris's melt. uh So it can prove to you that David didn't write any of this. No just kidding just kidding, but Damian actually went in and started that blog and then found a github issue that he found was useful and then some more documentation and stuff to help. You actually like step by step, get through this notarization process, get it done quickly and learn from his his journey.

C

Trying to do that to his hammer and Mac out, perhaps so super easy lots of screenshots, which I always need just follow it through and you'll, be good to go. Everyone will still be able to use your apps nobody's gonna, get mad apple, isn't gonna, kick you out of the store, so oh great blog, I, also love I, don't know if anyone's known as this, it's Damian fYI I loved that I didn't know. That was a thing until I stumbled upon his blog. That.

B

Is cool yeah he's got a whole suite of apps if I recall that are all Alexa based, so he's got a Tizen watch, an Apple watch, a bunch of other ones if I recall and- and he has really long hair. Now, it's not as short as it isn't that picture. I, always love meeting people in person right at events, Sam dev, some and stuff like that, and it's like wait. A second wait.

C

A second cool: okay, next move, so this one's on the couch based blog, very fancy, but it's using this by Rob who I saw on Twitter when he coming came out with the gif of this, and it looked super cool. So then he decided to do a walk through of it. So it's like if anyone played a was that game called the draw game where you drew something it was like pictionary with your friends.

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Anyways, it's just like that, except it's using Couchbase, so I don't know if it used to catch mice in first place, but it did so it's a walk through uh yeah. It does this great dinosaur, drawing it looks like the Legoland Loch Ness on certain Disneyworld, but yes, the going through using skia for it a little bit about how coach based mobile works, a picture of Rick from Rick and Morty, and then the sample code for this app, which is fantastic so um then a whole bunch of things.

C

I'll do to continue to post and add, and things like peer-to-peer, replication and stuff with toad face. Yeah. All right, then Michael riddle into I. Had the pleasure of meeting at xamarin developer summit wrote this blog. That was a clone of Air New Zealand, so I was really heavily focused on animations, which is it's super cool and you can see like the transition between the two pages of the flight or destinations or and whatnot is really clean and just makes the app look really nice and fast. So he goes through the architecture.

C

Kind of apt he's trying to build and at the replication replication you have these beautiful circle. Images I, don't think he uses your plugin here, though James sorry.

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Person how not to use mine I saw.

C

That I was really good. Blog too I should put that in here. So this is a super short blog post too. So it's a quick and dirty like you know, make your airline clones because they look really nice all the time.

C

Finally, speaking of all this beautiful UI things that we've been talking about it, Stephen Thorson, who we talked about right at the beginning, who's heading up, the xamarin UI July initiative wrote this guest post about snippets on dev, which I talk about all the time, because it's amazing- and it is the UI collection of amazing xamarin forms you eyes. So you just upload your your app. Maybe it's abstracted out!

C

So it's just like you know explicitly code and no functionality or just a clone of something you're already building go ahead, put it on the snippets website, and then you get this nice little badge. Super cool, ah just emailed.

A

Stephen today and I said: hey what, if we do, a snippets community challenge or we give away xamarin stickers and maybe snippet stickers or it so that might be coming.

C

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Stay close to that we have a few community upcoming challenges. I'm really excited for in the works some stuff around the new Android stuff that we've been doing. I was thinking. This would be cool, so you're in the chat room you're like whoa. That would be really cool. Cuz I would love some snippet and xamarin stickers, give a thumbs up and then we'll make that happen. Sending stickers around the globe really easy, sending anything other than stickers around the globe, really difficult. That's what I'm finding yeah return.

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C

That's it: that's the blog's I try not to take too much time today. I know I can talk forever because they're all really exciting. So definitely if you have blogs for now next month, tweet me put them on comments on the videos. We'll take a look. We we collect them throughout the month. So let me know alright David your turn. Alright,.

B

Sharing the pull requests, can you see me you got me yeah.

A

Am in a little bit worse, though, alright.

B

B

That's that amazing.

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B

So I wanted to start off with the Mac iOS contribution. So this is everything that is Xcode 11 and iOS 13. And you know this is a lot of work at the low-level binding level from our core team, where they are making sure that they expose all the different SDK api's for doing iOS, iPad OS, which is really just iOS and as well as Mac OS and then some of the other frameworks.

A

We have an iPad OS support. Wait will what's that.

B

Also known as iOS oh hey, look, this little thing is in the way sorry I'm just noticing that that little box is in the corner, whatever yeah so I want to just to kind of call out in bulk that we have had a lot of community contributions here, which is amazing even to the point where some of these whole frameworks were bound and submitted by, for example, Jonathan Conte.

B

Here software engineer, student at EPS in France, so the French are getting involved here and I know that the team was very excited to see these pull requests. You can see they've been merged. So thank you very much for that and to everybody who submitted both Xcode 11 binding updates, as well as some of the fixes in the bug. The bug fixes yeah I.

A

Think I didn't realize that we have that community tag I'm going into xamarin essentials right now and I'm adding this community tag because that's gonna make it so much easier to figure out.

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B

I knew I would like to get to get the other teams to adopt this as well, because when it does come, my turn to you know sift through, especially with the salmon forms repository. There are hundreds every month and to go through them and see see what was a community versus what was from the team. Well, you know it could take some time. All right. I wanted to feature this one from Andre, who is the well-known now I think, author of a hot reload plugin?

B

Of course we're gonna be talking about sam'l hot reload today, but you may know andre from that, as well as cardview and several other nice plugins, that a lot of people are using now. So this is a contribution for Mac OS to include the barre title. So I wanted to primarily feature this one, because sometimes I get asked a lot of times. I get asked where's, Mac OS. What's the salmon forms story there is it supported? Is it still in preview, etc?

B

And you know that whole preview label, with with the especially the desktop platforms, gets a little fuzzy and hard to just kind of say. This is exactly where the quality of it stands, primarily because some of these things are community contributed like the WPF back end and the GDK back end for xamarin forms.

B

So you can get to a lot of places with zamaron forms, but the core team focuses on iOS and Android and then UWP so kind of in that in that order, in terms of what's most useful to you, it's really driven by you and what you need from us. So, but you know we are very welcome and very open to taking Mac, OS and and other contributions to all the platforms that are part examine forms. So please keep those coming. Don't.

A

Forget David I also shipped my very first Mac OS app powered by xamarin forms. If you about.

B

A month ago, so.

A

Just saying it's anything is possible. It.

B

Is possible and I just opened it, but you can't see it cuz I'm. Only sharing my browser, yeah I, use them with all of my twitch streaming is.

A

That really it you actually have it installed. I do.

B

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My goodness thank.

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Screen the keep.

A

I do see a gray box.

B

Ridiculous, the way that teams does that right, box action, how strange okay, so that is Mac OS and then we've got a series of PRS here from the other, andre 'not sq and he's been doing quite a bit of work in the bindable z-- area. So this is fixed bindings. It's a bug fix for bindings to knowable types. So, of course, what this is a c-sharp eight thing right where you now have nullable types, and so you might be wanting to bind something that takes advantage of that, and so this addresses that concern.

B

In addition to that, we have a nullable date, picker, which has been opened. Some conversation and some reviews are happening on this one right now. So if you want to go, take a look at it and add your two cents: please do, if not just to give it a nice thumbs up and tell him how much you appreciate it.

B

I know from the recent survey that I did I think I'm becoming known for doing surveys, but I do love to get as much customer data and- and you know, for the knowledge of what you're doing on a regular basis so that it informs our our decisions. But one of the top features that people asked for in a survey about three weeks ago was for nillable pickers of all variety, whether it's a time picker or straight up picker or a date picker. So hey this is coming.

B

You can now do knowable pickers or you will be able to do in the near future.

B

Let's see here from Adrian Knight longtime contributor, one of our one of our favorites and he's added. The ability to show modal prompts so we've got a couple of animation or maybe not animation, just screenshots. So this is your typical display alert right now you can take input, pretty sweet right, I'm.

A

So excited yes, very.

B

Very convenient and I do know that, from from the most current all up survey, that many of you make use of modal's, pop-ups and popovers, and so we will look into what we can do to better support those scenarios. That seems to be a pretty big one that we should fill for, examine forms, although there are some great community plugins out there today to solve those needs. So that's always a bit tricky. When you have such really good plugins out there that already solved the need.

B

Do we actually turn our effort into building something into xamarin forms when something that's already doing that? So it's a conversation to be had, but I do know that for a lot of you when you do need to get through regulations or approvals, knowing that everything is inside, the box makes that whole process easier. You don't have to explain where code came from that way.

B

All right, auto focus next view from entry, so this is from Joe I, always think it is Joe good, sometimes I'm, like oh wait, did I, say the name right, Joe Menke from North Dakota, South Dakota. It sounds wrong, but yeah. This is the situation where you've got the keyboard up and it has the next button for the done return type, and you want to be able to hit that next and have it immediately go to the next field, set the focus properly and all that that's what this PR is all about.

B

So this is for iOS, Android and UWP, and you can take advantage of that. Some of these are you know great PRS, maybe not headliners, but very useful I mean this is something that you're going to use on just about any longer form right. So I want to make sure that we highlight these things that you know that they're available to you, of course, they'll be highlighted in documentation and in samples as well. All right, you, you WP collection, view selection mode, so I know that you know Mady.

B

You showed some several of those blog posts. That featured the collection view. It is still in preview at this point we're working on getting to feature parity between iOS and Android before we ship that initially so we're focusing on that. As our initial first release. Uwp has goods fairly good support, but it's not at feature parity, so we're looking at still considering that to be in a preview status when we do ship the ios and android, because they will be ready in advance.

B

So we don't want to hold things back and keep things out of your hands. We want to make sure that that's available to you, but in the meantime, we're very grateful that we have community contributions like this all the way from China to add functionality for the uwp side of things. So this is for selection mode, single, multiple selection modes. You can see that several people had already run into this issue because it resolves several issues for us. Yeah awesome I'm really excited about collectionview. It's going to be super useful I'm using it everywhere.

B

At this point, I'm gonna be spending some time later today, on twitch using the collection view, alright, scrollbar visibility. This is something I ran into when I was starting to use the collection view as I wanted to hide the scroll bars and that's something that you can do on all of our other scrollable views. It just hadn't been implemented yet on collection view. It was on the list, but Ravi here, Robert Ravinder beat us to it, so he implemented that for us.

B

So now you can do horizontal and vertical scrollbar visibility on your collection view as you need to meet your UI needs. So there you go very nice, I love, seeing these contributions even to things that are still baking and still basically in a preview status. This is a this has to be the true definition of open source or one of the most Ravindra was not done. He had another contribution for us, so you may have seen and I think it was 4.0.

B

We introduced the option for using wk webview as opposed to UI webview, because that's what the Apple documentation is recommending they're pushing everybody to this new implementation, wk I believe stands for WebKit. So what this one does is. It opens up the constructor for you to be able to pass in this configuration object and that configuration object enables doing things and I've got the documentation here. Things such as how to treat media playback within that webview. Should it play by by default, should it be picture picture as well as how should things load?

B

How should things scale within that webview? So if you need to have that additional configuration when you're doing a web view within xamarin forms specifically for iOS, then you can take advantage of this and you could probably do all of this well I! Guess if you go look I haven't taken o tested this obviously, but it has been merged. Let me go look. It is PR real, quick.

B

No, it just adds the additional constructor there, so you can get into that in the in a custom renderer and just extend the WK webview renderer and take advantage of that that perimeter cool and then one more here to wrap this up and then we can get on to Alex. So I have always known you could do vertical text alignment and labels, and certainly you have the option to do horizontal alignment in different places. But when it comes to text inside of entry search bar and entry cells, you didn't have that option for vertical.

B

So if you've ever tried to do whether it's base aligning or Center aligning or any of that sort of thing, it can be a real hassle and I. Think we've even had some Twitter conversations about how how you can have so many near misses with your alignment of your label and your entry, and things like that. So this will be a big help, also from Andreya test queue. So now you have the option of vertical alignment on all those.

B

Of course that's gonna be just with probably a start middle and an end that sort of things so excited to see these. These were only ten of the pr's of literally hundreds across all the salmon repositories.

B

So if you didn't see something that meets the need of what you have right now, I highly recommend you go check out the github for, for that particular product and see if it's in the works and if it's not in the works, ask for it and if it hasn't been asked for yet yeah or you want to contribute it hey. Let's, let's take that contribution. I know that the forms team in particular is working on some new guides updated to be able to help everybody make their first time contributions.

B

I know: we've highlighted this before I think it's a great story but Gerald, who is not the salmon forms team started out doing his first contribution just a little bit over a year ago, as part of a community effort and with the help of other community members, so we'd love to see the community rallying around each other. Helping helping your fellow developers send us some PRS I know that I say that all the time we love working with you, how do I, unsure.

C

I also want to call out real quick. We do have a brand new code samples browser on Docs at Microsoft, comm I'm gonna drop a link right now, but if contributing still isn't your thing but you're looking to get interested in other parts as Ameren or expanding your xamarin skills brand new browser, it has all of our code samples across amber and a bunch of other products, Microsoft development tools and frameworks, and all that great stuff, Sal and.

A

Maddy usually have frozen completely on the screen there. You turn off the webcam turn it back on Oh.

C

No, okay and yes right, you can in fact contribute to Doc's yeah.

A

C

A

People well just another day, someone was like oh yeah, you're gonna, so I was like. Oh you know some. You know things with notifications and I sent it off to the app center team. They're, like you know you just edit the docs right there. That's a good point. I always forget that I can hit that edit button so boom good to go. Alright I think it's time, blog post. He.

B

Does community.

A

Pr's done we have so much to talk about now. It's time for mr. Alex Corrado themselves. I was going buddy talk about that hot, hot reload or reddy's. It's all you! It's all you all the time. All.

D

Right well, hello, I'm super excited to talk about hot reload today, so we have a couple slides, so I'm, just gonna sort of give like a high-level overview first and then we can go into like a demo.

D

So first off I, just want to point out like well David was so giving that great update about the Zaman forms changes. He was mentioning the community hot reload plug-in by Andre and I just want to make it clear. Just so, there's no confusion that but I'm gonna talk about now is entirely different.

D

Andres hot reload is awesome, but what we're doing now is if you've been around the xamarin community for a while, you probably remember the likes of live player, live reload, and so so our hot reload is sort of like a culmination, slash evolution of our past work there and and really so this time around. How do I there we go this time around. We really wanted to focus on having it just work.

D

So the main thing is that you know: there's no nougats to install no changes to your code that you need to do no ports to forward you. Just hit the bug on your xamarin forms app and whether it's running on iOS or Android, on simulator, emulator or device Harlow's gonna be ready to go so as soon as you make. Some changes to your zamel files and hit save you'll just see those updates in real time.

D

So that's that's the goal at least we're in early preview now, and so you so you know there might be some some things still to iron out, but but yeah that's the goal, and, and the nice thing is that it's actually it's just running your app. So so all of your your data, there is there, your back-end, all your app logic is running so you're gonna have like a full. You know rich experience that works.

D

You know with all your custom controls and third-party libraries two frameworks and things that maybe the the sam'l preview or doesn't quite handle today. So so that's the benefit of that. So basically, so how does it work?

D

So when you hit the bug we basically piggyback over the debugger connection, and- and so you know when your app starts loading- we inject our hot reload assembly into your app, which is just going to sit there unnoticed in the background, until you make a change to your zamel file and as soon as you hit save, we connect to our agent that's running in your app and then the agent takes care of updating the page. So today we're sort of swapping out things at the view and page level.

D

So what that means is that, as long as you know, if you, if you're writing everything in sam'l, then it already should just work, but there might be cases where you've done some stuff in code and and you might lose some view state regarding that. So that's still something that we're working on and on our roadmap already before we're out of preview, we're working to move towards more incremental approach that should preserve most of your state and pretty much be transparent. Hopefully, so that's the goal.

D

Is hot reload? This is the fire. This is the emoji. What.

A

Are the official emojis because I've seen a few different narrations, but yes.

C

It is fire counterclockwise arrows and the reason we do counterclockwise arrows is because it looks circular on iOS and Mac OS and it's slightly thinner, but it's still somewhat circular on Windows and Android, and the other ones are vertical, which looks weird I.

C

D

I tried a whole.

C

Different arrow I had two different arrows at once. It was a mess.

A

Someone was asking what happens with like if you link, if you're, using the linker in a debug, build which you should never do. But what, if you were good.

C

D

That is a good question, so right now it depends. First of all, you should not ever have linked all in a debug build anyway, because that's gonna interfere with the debugger, so I believe the default today is link SDK and that works fine for most cases, so iOS simulators and Android emulator and device. It's just for iOS device right now. You need to disable your linker entirely, unless sort of just a factor of the way that a of T is working and we're still looking at that, so yeah still still preview, but um ya.

A

D

A

Know linker itself when you use the linker, that's a gonna slow down your build times, because it has to link out your application, especially if you do all so. One recommendation if you're in debug has always been the default, is don't link like they're. The only time you would ever want to link is, if you want to for some reason test what the you're doing right, that's kind of, like my only thought.

A

Maybe everyone else has different opinions here, but the only time that I've ever done it like we do linker on the xamarin essential samples, because we want to make sure since we want to optimize our library, for it, then that it always works. But we pay a price because it's very slower builds because you're linking, but basically, if you're in debug Neverland, is that a fair representation from p.m. the inside Alex yeah.

D

I'd, like you said, it's gonna slow down your build and it's gonna interfere with the debug or because those symbols are gonna, go away. So, but, like you said, you absolutely should definitely test your app with the linker as well. It's just that. You know you won't. You won't be able to really hot reload, depending on if you're on iOS devices or Android.

A

The other question we had was so we're doing it on unsaved. Today. Has there been some sort of analysis of you know on save versus typing I'm sure it's I have my own a bit.

D

So you're saying like maybe we should just do it as you type yeah, yeah I, think I mean it's something that we sort of on our list of things to think about right now. I think save is a good sort of compromise and you know you should be saving a lot anyway, but I sort of like is a way for you to control like okay. This is you know in a state where I think it's worth, you know trying to reload and we certainly like you know we'll try.

D

You know if you're sort of halfway through typing- and you could save you know- will recover in you know, sort of give you those red squiggly. It's like hey, you have. You know an error here, but I, don't know I mean we'll think about it. We'll see what people say: yeah.

C

I believe there's also a plugin for visual studio right now. That saves our file for you as you type it's configurable. So if you really hate saving your file, because you can't get into that command s habit or control s habit on Windows, you can use that if your issue is that you want to try things before saving.

C

That is an interesting thing and definitely let me know, let me know those cases yeah.

A

I would say from our research that we've done too, because it's very preferential of how you use it. But I would say that from our research of past products, making it on typing beads to greater dissatisfaction of the product.

C

A

Stability of the product and additionally, just how you're doing it. Sometimes you want to build on entire screen and then every time you're doing that it could be messing with your state. But it is very like preferential like how you code and how you want to do it, it's kind of like tab versus spaces, but even that's still even offering something like that. You have found in research and sitting down and watching how people use the product. It becomes a experience, but we can always be I'm. Sorry to try to like to read.

A

What's going on I've all three chat windows up right now, my well.

B

I think that's a great it's a great conversation, so it's it's good to hear from people on these things and obviously they're eager to to have the experience so.

A

B

A

Samuel styler also thanks Mandy for the I have used sam'l styler and the default is to it's funny enough that it's actually the other way around, but it is to format on save and I turn that off, because I want to right-click format, because every time I do it I'm like I'm typing, right there and then changing stuff. So imagine me doing that. You know general.

A

Yeah and yes, I can move closer to the microphone. I was getting all relaxed over here so anyway. Sorry to detract yeah.

D

A

D

Right, so let me share my screen. Real quick, so I didn't know, I didn't know what to demo. So Dave was kind enough to suggest his awesome, app zappy, which is like a real tour de force. Sample of xamarin forms. There's a lot of cool stuff in here. That's straight-up, fun, github, so I was able to pull it right down so I just want to highlight this is I've just cloned it and you can see like there's no changes from from what was on get well, except for that at least.

B

D

Right now, there's no changes yeah, so I'm, just gonna run it straight out it straight out of github, basically and.

C

While the chassis- that's fine by again, yes, the sam'l previewer does work as you type and that works a little bit better because it's all inside the IDE it doesn't have to go over the debugger. So if you send bad stuff over the debugger, it's gonna be a little bit more annoying than just being able to change it right there inside a visual studio. But that's that's my comment there. It is a different behavior than that, so yeah we're definitely monitoring it. All right. Zap ease up cool.

D

So so the page I wanted to show the David selected suggested, showing was the product detail scenario and and I like this, because it's sort of like a real app. We have the data loading here right now, there's a lot of cool like effects going on just a lot of stuff that you know you see in like a real life app.

D

So first thing, that's jumping out at me just because I have bad eyes is that the text on the buttons are a bit small and I happen to notice right when I open the here's the zamel file. For this page like right at the top. Here we have some CSS that defines the button style.

D

So I was just giving a shot like you know, if I just bump up the size there and then hit save so you can see it so actually so this could be like a real running app, so it would have to reload that data again and again like going back to this thing, you know this is running your real app and you know you know. Sometimes that's good. You know when you have a lot of stuff going on that you you want to be able to.

D

You know, factor into the state of your app while you're iterating. Sometimes you don't want that, and so that's just to call out the previewer. You know the previews not going away and it really shines in those cases where you know you want to sort of have like a more Design time view, and you can see some some in here like there's the design time data so that that's the kind of thing that would work in the preview are not on hot reload, but for today for us, I can just I.

D

Think I can just disable the he's loading and if you can do that, then go for it see, but but, as you can see, I bumped up the font size on the buttons and there it is it's bigger, and you know the rest of the app is still working. So you still have this stuff fading in and out the data was still loading and everything.

D

So, let's see let's what else can we play with here? I noticed that the this watch button here had a little star on it, but the other ones like the Add to Cart doesn't where's that that's here and what's really cool, is that it's actually you like a it, looks like it's. A font using the new font image source, so I just went in and I could just like right-click on this star and I can see the list of all the different ones, so I think that's a new feature right.

D

The same old language service that lets.

C

D

C

News AMOLED of their own BS mac, which is now in stable, so.

D

I could take like, let's see like I, don't know which one of these would be the right icon. So this is like a case where you know I might experiment a bit and so I'm just gonna copy out this button image source of that this one and.

D

Let's see what happens so, let's try we'll just try shopping bag as soon as I save it once again it there it is it reloads. So maybe you know that's not the right one. So it's easy. It's easy to just go in now and I can just I can just play with it see what looks good shopping, cart so yeah there we go because it's Add to Cart, so that makes sense.

D

Let's see what else should we change here? I was like I was really interested like this is such a well-designed, app and so I was really interested in sort of seeing how this works, and one thing that jumped out at me was that there's like these visual material, but there's like here, it's like visual material and like on buttons, its visual default, so I was like I was curious.

D

You know, what's the difference, so I was like playing around so like what happens if I remove the you know, visual on the buttons like what does that look like oops, so you can see like now. They have the the iOS drop shadow and they're all caps, so it's probably good, like probably good, to leave it but, like you can also like like see like. Oh what's the difference, if I remove that they're so same now you see that code that lets the native iOS drop shadow being added back. It.

B

Hurts my eyes turn back.

D

But yeah I just wanted to highlight how easy it is to just sort of experiment. Now, with your app running yeah.

B

And you have it's certainly coming through pretty strong here on the stream that that black flash that happens during the reload. That was something you added intentionally right.

D

Yeah, so going back to sort of what I was saying before about about how it's sort of swapping out the different elements on your page, one thing that came up as people were saying like that it might be good to rerun the code in there on appearing too because, like that state that they setting up in encode, was not being preserved because we're swapping out the views entirely.

D

So what we're doing now is we're calling on disappearing and then on appearing, and so in order to sort of like drive that point home we're actually causing it to disappear and reappear on the screen.

B

Yeah I like that, because sometimes when you're really just tweaking a minut detail, sometimes you're wondering did it work. Didn't that work? What happened right.

D

Exactly so that that helps with that too, how.

A

Did you make it so sorry? Oh you.

D

Want me to do it again: yeah I'll put this back to like. Let's see something like that, so you see that fader Maiden, oh, but.

A

You added that specific, oh, that fade animation, I right so.

D

That's how I reload specific but yeah.

D

B

Make it sound so simple.

D

Well, that's the idea that the goal, if we're doing our job right, it will seem it should seem simple. Now.

A

How does it, how does it handle like if you miss type things or get things wrong, just in general like how does like you know what, if I'm, using different resources and I type things wrong or I reference things incorrect like what it would happen there well.

D

That's a great question so like, for instance, when I was trying to get rid of that initial, like loading animation, that was that was getting in the way of my reloading I. Just I was like. Oh, this looks like animation. I'm just gonna delete this stuff, so I did that and then, when I saved it I came down and I happened to notice down here. These are actually using those resources. Oh.

A

D

So you'll see if there we go, that it actually gives you the error message when you mouse over the squiggles, so.

A

Kind of it is it like ignoring. It, then, is that what it's doing yeah.

D

So we try now to continue reloading, so even with, even if I don't put that back and I still want to start. You know changing some things like I changed this margin down something. Theoretically, it should just keep reloading around that that error so I mean the idea. Is it's like you know, you're running your app and and and we want uh sort of for you to do whatever you know, you need to do and you know not make you have to stop and rebuild.

B

Yeah there's a couple other things to probably mention about this- that are pretty awesome: it's using Zam animation library for all the animations, so that's a separate nougat. It's using that loading from Steven easy loading as well. It's using converters value converters, therefore, a lot of those translations and things, and you can go in there and tweak those parameters as well and see those things update.

B

There's just it's. It's not a simple page, there's a lot of things going on here and it works flawlessly. It's really nice.

D

Kind of like you started to see what kind of things I can't we can have ado. Yeah things you.

B

Can load it up pretty bad? The somebody was tweeting earlier today: I apologize, I, don't have the name on the tip of my tongue, but this also apparently worked with native forms so forms embedding. If you're embedding this view into a samurai OS for exam or Android app yeah, you can still edit the sam'l it'll reload it and then, of course, I've tried this myself but native views. So if you're accessing the iOS or Android native assembly and doing like a UI label or UI text field, etc, those will reload as well.

B

So that's pretty awesome.

C

So we didn't have a question in the chat, a release date for all this stuff. So this is in private preview right now, AKMs live sam'l, hot reload, which you can sign up for and hopefully get it in the next couple weeks, so we're kind of rolling it out in waves. So you know slowly but surely, and then what we're gonna do is we're gonna ship it in public preview built right into Visual Studio, so the private preview.

C

You have to set up a little bit separately, but it will be part of a preview visual studio built to the public in the future, hopefully sooner rather than later, but I don't have any dates to share at this moment and then we're gonna turn it off we're gonna. Let you turn it on we're.

C

Gonna make sure it's still good once it's built in when everyone thinks it's ready to go when we get feedback from all of you and you all think it's a tool that you could use every day with no issues, we will start to just turn it on by default. Give you the option to turn it off. If you don't want to, but it will all be right there in visual studio, it should just work. We're gonna make it part of our getting started guides.

C

It's just gonna, be the thing that the thing that you do excuse me when you build your xamarin, you guys now so, like I said sooner rather than later. If you look at the landing page, it says 2019. So that gives you a window of time. That is like less than infinite. We.

B

Try hard, you have lots of hints right, but without we just had the freedom to tell you exactly when we're thinking so.

A

Yeah, it's true. There is a cadence in which visual studio updates, that's usually an indication when things happen. There's usually events that happen throughout the year. Yes,.

C

A

C

A

Know it would be interesting to talk about too is like alex. Is you know you you put this out right now, it's been out for a few weeks and you know you're starting to get a lot of feedback from you know our developers using the product. What is that you know cycle been like when people start getting even the public preview, like what kind of you know what kind of feedback know you're hearing about? How do you work with you know? We don't have everybody source code to test it on.

A

It's like how is the team working they're like? What's the inside story of how to best work with the development community, yeah.

D

I mean we've been getting a lot of great feedback so far, which is awesome and so we're trying really hard to you know be receptive and responsive to people. We've had calls with people where they showed us. They walked us through. You know what issues they were having and yeah. So yeah, it's been really great and it's been really helpful because people are doing all sorts of different things in their apps, and you know some things that we never even imagined.

D

So it's really cool to see and I'm glad that we're having a chance to just those issues now yeah.

A

Is the feedback button inside a visual studio Zack? Is that provide enough context like if someone has an issue or something like that like? What's the best way to get? Are there special logs for not reload on the machine that you know people can send in yes,.

D

So now we're basically putting all our logs into the xamarin IDE logs, so yeah everything when you click that record problem, we're gonna get everything we need, hopefully, to look at that very.

A

Cool all right, yep.

C

Screenshots videos copy pasting, whatever pops up in your Outlook output window for now, as long as you can share it with us, and you can share things internally with Microsoft as well. So if you have proprietary things that you need to file a bug on, and it's too complicated to make like a sample a repro simple case, and you can share things so that we're the only people who can see them, we don't share them. We.

A

Had some questions around go Mac versus back in PC versions of Visual Studio? Yes,.

C

So it will work on both I to use Visual Studio 2019 for Mac and 2019 for Windows it'll be built-in for all versions. Community professional enterprise no worries about that. It should work with all your custom controls. So if you have a license for things like telluric or sync fusion or any of those things, it should work totally fine with that as well. So don't worry, everything's gonna be great. Just keep your eye on the blog I'll tell you when you can use it.

A

All right anything else from anyone, I'm just I'm, just looking at the chat I'm responding to Daniel in here, so.

C

We should quote the xamarin UI July link, because I know they're getting started soon. Rave them as if we can I saw that one man.

B

C

B

C

This account, so you know it's not just us yeah.

A

I, don't even think I'm logged into the right account, so I'm cool, alright I think it's gonna, do it for the community, and we put all of these on YouTube, so they'll be archived there. So, if you're already on YouTube, you can scrub back through see everything Alex. Thank you for joining us and showing off and walking through some of the complex parts of it. Thanks.

D

So much for having me yeah.

A

Awesome, alright, everyone will feel free to hang around more I, don't know where I don't know where and what account people are going to next. It's.

B

On jf, their sluice.

A

B

A

I'll paste it yeah.

C

Why does baby get link access and not me yeah thanks. There.

A

You go that's how we do it actually I'm not even signed in. So that's great, all right cool, all right. Everyone, oh thanks for tuning in, of course, we do this on Tuesdays and Thursday asp.net on Tuesday on Thursdays. We have xamarin languages and runtime Visual, Studio and desktop so be sure to check out and subscribe to the dotnet foundation, the xamarin YouTube and the Visual Studio twitch, all the different accounts, literally, if it says Visual, Studio, xamarin or dotnet just hit that subscribe like smash that button. Do all the things. Click thanks.

A

Everyone for tuning in thanks, everyone for joining everyone, have an amazing day, wherever you're at in the entire world. We all love every single one of you. We do.