{"id":38896,"date":"2019-02-21T13:11:51","date_gmt":"2019-02-21T21:11:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.xamarin.com\/?p=38896"},"modified":"2019-08-30T08:34:45","modified_gmt":"2019-08-30T15:34:45","slug":"xamarin-azure-office-hours-recap-december-january","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/xamarin\/xamarin-azure-office-hours-recap-december-january\/","title":{"rendered":"Xamarin and Azure Office Hours Recap from December 2018 and January 2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\t\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/44\/2019\/03\/HeartDevs.png\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-38897\" src=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/44\/2019\/03\/HeartDevs.png\" alt=\"I \u2665\ufe0f Developers\" width=\"720\" height=\"405\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s right, I \u2764\ufe0f every single one of you(!) and I want to know more about your stories building mobile apps. I want to hear stories of your successes and also, the not-so-successful adventures. Tell us what we can do better. Go ahead, ask me any questions about Xamarin or Azure, or mobile development in general and will do my best to answer. If I don&#8217;t know, I will find somebody who does. Sign up for a time to tell me your stories during <a href=\"https:\/\/aka.ms\/office-hours\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">My Office Hours<\/a>!<\/p>\n<p>On to recap what happened this past December and January!<\/p>\n<h2>December and January Recap<\/h2>\n<p>In these last two months, five topics were brought up several times that&#8217;s worthwhile to discuss at a broader level:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Android development experience<\/li>\n<li>XAML tooling<\/li>\n<li>UWP<\/li>\n<li>Documentation<\/li>\n<li>Azure Mobile App Services<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Let&#8217;s dive into this one by one.<\/p>\n<h3>Android Development Experience<\/h3>\n<p>Comments about the Android development experience were by large positive! Several people commented on the faster build times that they&#8217;re seeing. And that makes sense! In Visual Studio 15.9 and Visual Studio for Mac 7.7, the Android team made several improvements to initial build time, incremental build time, and deploy time. Go ahead and update to the <a href=\"https:\/\/visualstudio.microsoft.com\/vs?WT.mc_id=officehours-xamarinblog-masoucou\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">latest version of Visual Studio<\/a> to see these performance increases yourself.<\/p>\n<p>The Android emulators provided one area of confusion, however. Hyper-V or HAXM? Which is better? How can you even tell? And should you care?<\/p>\n<p>Of course, you <em>should<\/em> care. If possible, run the Hyper-V emulators, they&#8217;ll give you the better performance. <a href=\"https:\/\/docs.microsoft.com\/en-us\/xamarin\/android\/get-started\/installation\/android-emulator\/hardware-acceleration?WT.mc_id=officehours-xamarinblog-masoucou\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">This article<\/a> does a great job explaining the different hardware accelerations available. But which emulator, and how do you create them? You can read more on how to <a href=\"https:\/\/docs.microsoft.com\/en-us\/xamarin\/android\/get-started\/installation\/android-emulator\/device-manager?WT.mc_id=officehours-xamarinblog-masoucou\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">create them here<\/a> and check out <a href=\"https:\/\/channel9.msdn.com\/Shows\/XamarinShow\/How-to-Create-and-Manage-Your-Own-Android-Emulators?WT.mc_id=officehours-xamarinblog-masoucou\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">this video<\/a> too. And recently the team has revamped the detection code, so it should pick the best emulator for you when debugging.<\/p>\n<h3>XAML Tooling<\/h3>\n<p>Another hot topic was XAML tooling &#8211; or really the editing experience when writing XAML code. Intellisense is the one thing that separates Visual Studio from Notepad (ok, amongst many, many others), and having solid Intellisense when writing code is a huge productivity boost. And I&#8217;ll be honest, XAML Intellisense isn&#8217;t as good as other languages that Visual Studio supports. And judging by some of the comments I received during the office hours, you&#8217;ve noticed that too.<\/p>\n<p>But that&#8217;s changing!<\/p>\n<p>First off, Visual Studio 2019 is <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.xamarin.com\/whats-new-for-xamarin-developers-in-visual-studio-2019-preview-2\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">introducing a Property Panel<\/a> for editing XAML.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/44\/2019\/03\/PropertyPanel-BlogDec2018.gif\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/44\/2019\/03\/PropertyPanel-BlogDec2018.gif\" alt=\"XAML Property Panel\" width=\"1496\" height=\"992\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-38694\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>This will allow you to edit common Xamarin.Forms control properties, not from XAML, but from a Visual Studio property panel.<\/p>\n<p>Check out all the other XAML improvements <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.xamarin.com\/new-xamarin-forms-xaml-intellisense-visual-studio-2017\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">coming in this blog post<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, let us know what other improvements can be made, by clicking on the Visual Studio <em>Smiley Button<\/em> or the <em>Provide a Suggestion<\/em> menu item in VS for Mac.<\/p>\n<h3>UWP<\/h3>\n<p>It was great to hear from so many of you who are developing desktop apps using UWP! One of the things I do with these office hours is both provide feedback to the product teams on what isn&#8217;t working for the community, but also what <em>is<\/em> working. So it was great to hear that so many people are having success in creating UWP applications using Xamarin.Forms!<\/p>\n<p>However, there is some concern that Xamarin may drop UWP support from Xamarin.Forms. I&#8217;m here to tell you that&#8217;s not true! Xamarin.Forms has never stopped supporting an active platform. And there are no plans to stop support for UWP. So continue to develop those great UWP Xamarin.Forms apps, and feel comfortable in doing so knowing that UWP will be supported.<\/p>\n<h3>Documentation<\/h3>\n<p>A documentation renaissance is going on at Microsoft lately! Last year Xamarin merged their documentation into the Microsoft documentation at-large. All of the Microsoft documentation is now open source on GitHub. And there are even <a href=\"https:\/\/docs.microsoft.com\/learn\/?WT.mc_id=officehours-xamarinblog-masoucou\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">free interactive courses<\/a> you can take from Microsoft Docs to up-level your skills.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/docs.microsoft.com\/en-us\/media\/learn\/Product\/Learn\/learningpath_graphic.svg\" class=\"aligncenter\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Again, I heard great things from the community about the Xamarin docs, how easy to read and helpful they are.<\/p>\n<p>However, there were a couple of suggestions that could make them even better. The first was to include recipes of common things that mobile developers need to do every day. An example would be to write to an on-device database. Or make a call to a web service. I&#8217;m going to soft announce right here, right now, that I&#8217;d like to start a community effort to come up with a recipes guide that&#8217;s hosted on GitHub that does just that. If you&#8217;re interested in helping, reach out to me at <a>@codemillmatt<\/a> and we&#8217;ll make it happen!<\/p>\n<p>Another suggestion was to a list of examples of apps with &#8220;pretty&#8221; user interfaces using Xamarin.Forms. It just so happens that Javier Su\u00e1rez Ruiz maintains such a list! It&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/jsuarezruiz\/xamarin-forms-goodlooking-UI\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">on GitHub<\/a> and showcases some very slick looking UIs!<\/p>\n<h3>Azure Mobile App Services<\/h3>\n<p>Finally: What is the future of Azure Mobile App Services?<\/p>\n<p>Everyone who has made it this far in the article should to <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/Microsoft\/appcenter\/wiki\/Roadmap\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">go here<\/a> to be impressed by what the Visual Studio App Center team has in the works!<\/p>\n<p>Especially this item:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Introduce new identity, storage, and compute backend services for mobile application development.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>That&#8217;s right &#8211; there are new mobile development capabilities coming to App Center, and even better they&#8217;re being designed in the open. So this is your chance to go there and comment on the work being done, let your voice be heard!<\/p>\n<h3>To Sum It All Up<\/h3>\n<p>It was an exciting couple of months, and thank you to everybody who took part in the office hours! If you&#8217;re interested in talking about anything Xamarin, mobile development, or Azure related, please don&#8217;t hesitate to sign-up for my <a href=\"https:\/\/aka.ms\/office-hours\">office hours<\/a>. I would \u2764\ufe0f to talk to you!\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Matt Soucoup wants to hear your stories about building mobile apps with Xamarin or Azure or mobile development in general &#8211; so go ahead, ask him anything! In this post he recaps the last few months of open office hours covering what he has been hearing from Xamarin developers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":569,"featured_media":40875,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[8,28,4],"class_list":["post-38896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-developers","tag-events","tag-office-hours","tag-xamarin-platform"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Matt Soucoup wants to hear your stories about building mobile apps with Xamarin or Azure or mobile development in general &#8211; so go ahead, ask him anything! In this post he recaps the last few months of open office hours covering what he has been hearing from Xamarin developers.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/xamarin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/xamarin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/xamarin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/xamarin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/569"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/xamarin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38896"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/xamarin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38896\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/xamarin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/xamarin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/xamarin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/xamarin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}