[00:00:00] Welcome back everyone to the Xamarin podcast, keeping you up to date with the latest and greatest and mobile development for Xamarin developers covering the world, the xamarin.net Azure and more. I met soak up and I'm James, Amanda magnet. Oh my goodness. Matt, Matt, Matt. It is August. I cannot believe. [00:00:29] That the year is basically Don already. I know we're eight months in four to go. What is that? Eight divided by four. It's like two thirds. I don't know. I don't do math anymore. I got a calculator, but yeah, it's almost done. It's almost done. It's crazy. Every time I wake up, I'm just like, uh, how did we get this far? [00:00:48] And I don't want it to be fall yet. I don't want it to get all gray outside. And, and, and, uh, I don't know. It's, it's, it's fascinating. That is, uh, this year is definitely fascinating to say the least, but, uh, I'm [00:01:00] glad that we're here, we're back. And we got a lot of news, you know, we had some big releases, uh, this. [00:01:05] This month, uh, from Xamarin forms and new versions of visual studio, you just wanna hop into it, Matt. Yeah. Will do. And Xamarin forms four dot eight, which, you know, it kind of like is August the 0.8. Right. And you've got four more months of the year. How do you, how do you like that? I work that in, you know, it's kind of like transition anyways, a pretty cool new features on there. [00:01:27] And, uh, one of the cool new features is the way to draw some things. Like you can build things. Somethings in there you have a frame you want to fill it in with a gradient salmon forms for dot eight. Can do that for you. And it's with Dom with different type of brushes as we call it. So we're now getting down, it kind of in the low level things here with a drawing that you can do a. [00:01:50] Um, like a linear gradient brush with Xamarin forms. And so a linear gradient is you start with one color and it transitions [00:02:00] nicely to the other color. It's it's your typical gradient? So that's one type of brush that's Ameron forms is introduced. You also have a radio radio gradient brush, which is like, you're going to a circle type of a gradient. [00:02:16] That we're all kind of familiar with and you can do gradients stops in the middle tier. So with different offsets to like say, all right, I don't, my circle would be exactly in the middle. I want to, you know, offset over to the side or something. So you can do a lot of different things if these are gradients and these brushes, and I know James, you're all about the gradients. [00:02:38] That's a new hot thing. So what do you do these things? Are you, are you super excited? Have you used them yet? I have, yeah, they're super rat. We had Shane on the Xamarin community stand up earlier this month and it's super cool. I mean, it's great because I've been using pancake view for a long time. [00:02:53] Pancake view did go into diversion to data, added more platforms and more support. But what's nice about this is that [00:03:00] since it's just a brush that can be applied to backgrounds or other colors, it means that it works everywhere. Right? It works on any control in which there is a color. So anything that you want to do, you're not limited to it. [00:03:14] Now. I will say like, of course I'll still use pancake view and there'll be some unification of the API APIs, which I love because those are, you know, add some additional things on top of it. But I love this because they even extended. Some, uh, parts of shell that people not have been, um, yes. Before to adopt these gradients. [00:03:34] So now you can set the flyout backdrop color and you can set it to a gradient. So that's cool. So when people are flying in and out, you can have gradients at automatically. We actually sets the opacity differently on it. So these are cool, man. I think that. Having them built in, if you can understand the gradient stops or just to have ever used gradients before and does the same API from WPF, from my understanding. [00:03:59] So they're all [00:04:00] there. It's going to do guys. Yeah. That fly out backdrop color. When I was reading about is like, I thought it was the actual fly out that you can change the color on it, like okay. Big deal, right? Yeah. The, it's not that, it's the thing that's behind the fly-out that that's changing the color. [00:04:18] It's like, yeah. Oh, that's kinda neat. And so, yeah, you can make that a gradient and you know, I think you hit on a great point. James is that the brushes are a feature of anything that has a color is it's not a necessarily, like you're not creating a frame. You don't need a frame for this. It's just anything that has a color you can apply these rushes to. [00:04:38] So that's, that's pretty neat. And, um, another thing that we have in four eight is. Drag and drop support. So you can move an item, you know, you know, around a screen, um, or even to another application. And the first thing I thought that would be, this is be grateful or is the surface duo coming out when you have a dual [00:05:00] screen and maybe you want to. [00:05:01] You have two applications that were open at the same time, drag one from one over to the other. And I haven't tested it out, but I'm sure it probably would work. That's behind the experimental flag right now. So do you have to go ahead and implement or check that off to make sure you get that going, but that's included in the four eight and it's a. [00:05:21] Drag or what is it drop just to recognize her? I think that's, that's what it is. What is the gesture? Recognizer and, um, yeah, that's pretty cool. So it's just kinda like your tap gesture recognizer, except this one's a drop dress jester, drag gesture, recognizer, and a drop one. I think that's what they both are. [00:05:38] Yeah. Yeah. Drag and drop. So there's, it's not drag and drop. That's a recognizer, but there's a drag and a drop and you can set true and false. And it's a really cool because uh, automatically Xamarin forms, uh, will attempt to sort of serialize out what it is. Right. So if it's an image, Or text, it will know that it can drag text to another [00:06:00] label automatically, and you'll just do the right thing. [00:06:03] So if you had images, you could drag those around. Or for example, you could have a customized dashboard and you, cause I'm going to drag this entire element around now. It's not going to know. To reorganize those, but you can add some logic in the code behind because you can intercept any of those events and you can sort of create this interactive dashboard. [00:06:24] And again, the API it's exactly the same from other platforms like WPF or UWP. So you'd be able to add those in, but you're right. One of the coolest features. Is that it can also drag and drop to other applications, even non Xamarin applications. So if your application allows text or image to be dropped onto it, it'll automatically do that. [00:06:46] It does the evil little thumbnail thing. That's system level, right? Xamarinforms isn't doing that, but it will serialize it out that do the right thing in the system. And it'll drag and drop it across in, right. For the surface duo it's, it's an ideal [00:07:00] scenario. So if you have applications that have texts that you want drag and drop a bubble, like into word or something like that, or PowerPoint, how cool would that be? [00:07:08] You know, you can have these, you can really integrate well into the new, uh, ecosystem there, which I think is cool. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah. Xamarin forms moving to integrate with M three 65. It's one Microsoft, you know, we're. We're all ahead of that stuff. That's true. Yeah. It's rad. It's really nice. And I mean, going further right now is Xamarin forms for they came out, but we got new versions of visual studio, Matt didn't we, we shared in both, both visual studios, we, um, both on the Mac and on windows. [00:07:36] And, you know, as we were going through talking about this before James, I realized how. Long it's been since I use visual studio on windows. Um, I'm all about Mac and visual studio. Mac love it, but I have to fire up visual studio on windows a little bit. Just looking at some of these new features that we have out for it. [00:07:53] Um, it could, because one of them is. Kind of like, I'm going to think about this as like a [00:08:00] tool extension onto salmon forms for that age. We are talking about those gradient brushes. We have a property panel now to pick those colors out that you want. Because a lot of times it's really hard to like, all right, I know I want this light blue color, but. [00:08:15] How do you pick that light blue color? Right. It'd be nice to have that property panel there so you can kind of get it exactly where you want. And, um, so that's out there. Um, there's also, and you taught me a new word today. Adornment color adornment. This isn't windows only in a visual studio. You're typing in a color and you see that color pop up right next to you. [00:08:37] So you may be typing a hex code. And you see that light blue color that pops up like in a little square right next to it. So that's, that's super cool. So just see productivity enhancement cycle, along with that. And, um, and windows, there's now a new. Good conflict resolution. Um, windows are a whole gift flow. [00:08:59] Yeah, [00:09:00] it's great. It's like they rewrote the entire get it. You'll see. When you go in there, it's, it's not, it's different, but it's not completely different. If that makes sense. Like, I thought that I was gonna go in here and I was going to be like, Oh my goodness. I'm not going to understand what's going on. [00:09:16] Cause I'm used to the builtin stuff, but it's different. But also. Similar enough, but there's a lot of enhancements, so you can see branching and see all this stuff. So it's definitely, really cool. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. And there's some things I'm like, you could be able to right. Click to run unit tests. [00:09:31] They would be not necessarily Xamarin specific, but you know, everybody should be writing their unit tests. I never do, but you should be. And now you can also like determine which unit tests you want to run by writing some rules for that. And it's a lot of new key bindings for it. I mean, all these incremental steps has really. [00:09:50] Visual studio for both platforms is awesome. And all these, I don't want to call them little, but these new features are making them even better. So it's, it's exciting to see. Yeah, [00:10:00] it's super rad. There's all sorts of good stuff. You definitely have to check out these releases update today. If you haven't. [00:10:06] I updated mine. That's pretty quick. I'm pretty excited. And it's cool. Just to all of a sudden you have new features and new, cool things, and there's tons of refactorings built into both VSN vs for Mac. So definitely give it a go. And in fact, if you are a visual studio or visual studio for Mac enthusiasts, like I am myself. [00:10:24] Uh, there's a bunch of cool new shows over on the tour, which visual studio, twitch.tv/visual studio. In fact, on Mondays, um, Matt's Christianson does visual studio, remote office hours, where he interviews people from the visual studio team. It's really close at 11:00 AM Pacific. And then on Fridays at 2:00 PM, I am Pacific. [00:10:44] He's doing live coding where he's building extensions for visual studio live, which is something I've always. Wanted to understand how to do more. And there's just not a lot of, you know, Videos or documentation on how to do it. And Mads is [00:11:00] like the dude he's like the extensions dude. So, uh, he's doing that live on the Twitch visual studio, put a link in the show notes, but twitch.tv/visual studio. [00:11:10] It's super cool. Just to see more live streaming content. Yeah. I mean, it's, do we have more time to do the streaming? I don't know, but there is definitely more streaming coming out now and there's a lot of cool things like what Matt is doing. So definitely keep your eye on that channel. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. [00:11:26] So you've got the new releases go get that stuff. Updates, Xamarin forms for that eight I already have. And also we have some great blog posts from the Xamarin team and also from the community. The first one is from Charlotte, who goes I'm at dot com. She did a guest blog post on the Xamarin blog. I'm all about doing multilingual applications in Xamarin forms. [00:11:50] So she. Wrote up this blog post from her learnings. Um, she's written some plugins. On Newgate as well. So she sort of talks about her learnings of [00:12:00] translating applications, um, how to change things at runtime, how to bind his animal, and also talks about just some quirks, you know, since we're using platform controls, there are certain things that iOS and Android do. [00:12:14] So you can write some effects and you can write some tweaks for different pickers to really sort of fine tune your localization in your applications. That's a really in depth, great blog posts. And she also links to some great tools that she used as well. So, yeah, that's a good one. It's something that you want to do upfront. [00:12:32] Don't leave it to the end when all of your. Text is in your application because, you know, if you're trying to go global, you want to translate your application upfront. So definitely think about that and use some Residex files. It's not too difficult. I've done it before. So it's quite fun. Yeah. It's one of those things that it seems worse than what is could be. [00:12:52] And if you leave it to the end, it's going to be worse than what we think it's going to be, but do it upfront. And this article is so great. Um, as I was reading through it, I was like, Oh [00:13:00] man, that makes so much sense. I wish I would've did that for my apps. When I, when I had to make a multilingual and it's making an app, multilingual is something that you should be doing. [00:13:08] Regardless, even if you don't want it to go global there's even if you're just saying like, for us, James, if we were just keeping it in the U S we should make a multilingual anyway, so this is something you should keep front of mind. So this kind of next one, Kenny, it goes into, I think it kind of goes into the last thing we were talking about or what I was talking about with the gradient brushes and all that is cause it's more drawing. [00:13:32] How about shapes and paths? So James let's let's step back. How. Much time. Have you ever spent what, like ski, a sharp drawing out paths and stuff like that? Hello a lot. Really? No, not at all. I should. I should, because you know, a lot of, a lot of developers, I talked to her, very familiar with the system, drawing API and manually drawing stuff. [00:13:56] And a lot of people would go to ski a shark because they can just draw things manually. [00:14:00] It's been a while since I've gone in and done stuff, I liked the prebate controls. I'm a big fan of you do all the drawing. I'll just hang back and instead, a few properties. Yeah, me too. And that's one of the things that really was created about Xamarin forms is that it kind of took care of everything. [00:14:13] He never had to drop down and worry about drawing yourself on the platforms, but you don't have to now either, because we do have stuff we could do shapes and you can do paths now with, uh, forums. So we have things like lines, which you can imagine what a line is. It's aligned, but you can stroke it differently. [00:14:37] You can make a stroke colors. You can say how it, um, like vertical or horizontal things like that, and also eat Lipsey's. Now we're going to have to go back to geometry class of what in an ellipses, but you can do circles with the ellipses. Cause the circle is not, they put it especially lips. So long story short, and you can do also things like [00:15:00] when you're doing an ellipse, you can also do these, the stroke of what should go around it and the colors of it and everything. [00:15:05] Well, it's pretty advanced things with, with it. And this is the next thing. If you really want to get super advanced is because you can do paths. And now what's a path. A path is you can say, all right, I want to have one point here and then draw me. Aligned to this next point, essentially. And now you can really start doing some really complicated shapes and really cool looking shapes and even better is that you can open it like an SVG and a tech center. [00:15:34] And essentially it popped that XML then from the SVG in copyright, in the Xamarin forms is AML for the path. And, uh, It just works. Right. You can kind of just kind of view that SVG, but now it kind of just renders in XAML or in San Fran forms through this Ameral SAML path control. So yeah, super cool. Um, drawing a path for me is like, I'm [00:16:00] not going to do it. [00:16:00] I'm just going to use to filter and control, you know, but now you can do it. I mean, if you had, especially if you have an SVG already, do you like that? You can just take an SVG multiple path, shove it in there. Actually, I have a Javier coming on this Xamarin show. Next few weeks talking about this stuff in this blog post, which is really cool. [00:16:16] And this is a great blog talking about a lot of the advanced things that you can do with it, if you desire and, you know, that's the best part about it. Ideally, there's a lot of developers out there that are, you know, taking this drawing and building those controls on top of it. And there are some great reference community. [00:16:33] Um, things out there definitely take a look, look at this blog is really cool and all those things are open sources, grab the code and go, um, you know, talking about all this stuff to shapes, pass gradients, all these great community controls. Um, there has been an amazing, um, sort of ignite ignition, if you will. [00:16:51] New developers coming into the Xamarin ecosystem in the last year to two years. And, uh, I don't know who it was that retweeted, [00:17:00] um, Theodora. So theater Totaro she has been, and working on, she did the kind of like the 30 days of code in the summer type of thing. She was tweeting about how she was building out this college diary application. [00:17:14] And it sort of helped her track all of her studies and classes and GPA and exams. And I started to see like the beginning of, of her doing this. And then someone was treating her, you know, who'd retweeted your progression. I was kind of following, uh, seeing it a build built in the open. I thought it was so cool. [00:17:33] And I asked the Dora to do a guest blog post. I love guest blog posts by the way, um, sort of her journey into finding Xamarin and what she's been billing. So it's really cool because she's a fourth year university student and he's specializing in software development. And obviously this year is a lot different than previous years. [00:17:53] And she sort of had the summer too, to think about, you know, what could she want to build? Right. What was next? And she [00:18:00] started trying out different, uh, app development. She tried Android studio went to react native. But she knew about C- sharp. She did backend sort of web development's office use sharp found Xamarin forms and sort of building this amazing application. [00:18:16] Um, it's based on Xamarin forms, it uses sync, fusion controls. The UX essential kit also uses a Firebase backend to do online, offline data synchronization. She's cool. She talks about how she built it, um, all the time. Trials and tribulations, you use cool gradients on it. It's got all this cool stuff and it's cool just to see her journey, to be honest and, and see it, see it come to fruition. [00:18:42] She's getting ready to launch in the next few months, but you can follow it, um, on, on get 'em and she's constantly adding new stuff to it all the time, which is really fun. It's fun to see apps come together in the open, you know, I have not read this blog post yet, but I can't wait to dive through and actually [00:19:00] start following it then. [00:19:00] Yeah. So the community is the best AMA community communities, the best community by far. And I say it all the time, but we do have the best community and this is great. Super great. You know what that flows into the next thing I wanted to talk about. Community, right. the.net foundation. And now has a.net meet, meet ups, Paige. [00:19:24] And I don't know if this page is new, but I did discover something on here. That's new to me, which is perfect. Um, so if you go to the page and I will put a link to it in the show notes is. On the very bottom of the page, there's something called meetup resources. So a lot of folks now are running meetups online, virtually and well, right. [00:19:48] I need something new to present docs. Sometimes, you know, ideas are hard to come by, or maybe you're just running a workshop. You just have, you have a bunch of 'em like-minded folks who get together and you want to [00:20:00] work through something and like an all day hack or something like that. This, we have like a.net events and a box page, or even presentations where you can go out and you can, um, essentially premade presentation ready to go. [00:20:15] And it just walks you through. If you want to change it, go ahead and change it. I know James, you put a brand new workshop out there. Um, for forms. And so, yeah, this is super cool where it kind of gives at least gives you ideas to jump off with. And it's more than not just, uh, forms. There's like one on blazer there too. [00:20:32] So you can go exploring some new things. But yeah, there's presentation decks. There's workshops. There's a, even some eBooks out there too, and they're community based. So it's, this is just super cool. Um, and you can have base your next meetup office, something that's already created. So you don't actually have to do the work. [00:20:50] Yeah, no, you're still going to do a little work, but yeah, this is at least you can get an idea off of, off of it. Yeah. Yeah. And I did this month and last month re updated the Xamarin forms [00:21:00] workshop. It takes you from start to finish building a multi page application, iOS, Android windows. Um, it's really cool. [00:21:07] Um, I did this. Uh, originally at ignite last year and I've updated it. I've add paths. I got add gradients. Next action. Now that's out. Um, so all this stuff it's up to date right now, it's on four.seven Xamarin forms all updated to four dot eight. It's all in part C of five different parts. And you can start at any time. [00:21:26] And there's, uh, a project in all of them. There's a finished project too, which is cool. And then I'm, I'm working on a new backend. Module two. So that'll come hopefully before the end of the year. So you can kind of learn about data solutions as well, which I think we'll talk a little bit later on gas, but talking about meetups you're right. [00:21:42] There's more meetups than ever going online. And on that meetups page, you'll also find. A big button for the.net virtual user group. And this is super cool because it's a completely free user group to join. And the goal of it is twofold. Like right now there's [00:22:00] tons of user groups going online and let's say, you want to participate in them? [00:22:04] Well, you got to go join tons of meetups. Right? You gotta, you're like, Oh, I want to purchase the Seattle one, but I don't know that New York one looks cool. So I'll go, blah, blah, blah, all over the place. Wouldn't it be great. If there was just one, a single. Meetup user group that you could join and be notified about all of these online virtual meetups happening. [00:22:22] Well, that's what this is for. It's not a way to replace a meetups, but the idea is promoting and bringing to light like, Hey, look at all of these awesome meetups going on. Because people want to participate, but then also you don't want to like artificially grow your, you know, online user group. And then in five years when COVID is over, you know, then we can go back and then you just have, you know, you're notifying all these people. [00:22:48] So the idea is like, Hey, you can just go here and you see everything upcoming. So if you're a user group organizer, there's a simple form. You can fill out. You say, Hey, this is my next meetup. And they post it. The Danette foundation posts it on there. [00:23:00] Um, and you know, everything like that, it's still private. [00:23:02] So people have to register. But it enables sort of, um, just more people to participate from around the globe. And I think they're going to start doing like Donna foundation, user group meetups too, is to be able to find them they're all virtual. Uh, and another thing is cool too. To top it off is on that page. [00:23:19] Let's say you're your user group organizer, but you're like, you know what? I don't have the, you know, the means the bandwidth to, to, to host. I don't know what tools to use the data foundation. Well, help you go online. They will help stream your meetup. They'll handle all the logistics, all the streaming to YouTube for you. [00:23:40] And you say, I need some help on this meetup. Here's my topic. They set it up and boom, you're good to go. In fact, I've used it for the previous Seattle mobile dinette user groups. So it's really cool. And you can even see past events on the YouTube playlist. So it's pretty cool. Pretty cool. I really liked that idea a lot. [00:23:56] It's um, A great way to [00:24:00] both as an organizer, to get people interested in the topic that you happen to be talking about, or even like a lot of user groups, uh, specialize in a certain niche area, or even if you're an attendee to find out about things that you noticed might be happening, interested in, but aren't happening in your area. [00:24:18] Yeah. I'm all about it. I hope everyone, if you're a user group organizer listening, get in there. Post those events and be good to go. Alright. Last thing talking about online events last month was the.net comp focus on microservices, which was absolutely spectacular. Now I know if you're San Bernardino, you're like, why do I care about this? [00:24:35] Well, because maybe have a backend and you want to deploy some microservices. You want to learn about project tie or Coobernetti's or, or any of these awesome things that are happening in the Don ed ecosystem. Go take a look at all the recordings. Um, there's even workshop that's available too, which is really cool. [00:24:52] Um, great sessions. You know, if you're interested in learning about that GRPC or rest services, or like I said, project tie or dapper, [00:25:00] steel-toe all these things. I have no idea what any of these words mean, but any of them, uh, they're all cool. So they're all, it's all on there. And that really leads to Donna comp in November, the major huge one coming up as well. [00:25:12] So definitely go to dot dot net.net. Comp.net. Perfect. Okay. 90 days away from us recording November 10th through the 12th. So definitely give that a look, um, as well. So got all the on demand stuff, including the Xamarin comp xamarin.com from months ago, too. Don't forget to watch all those super rad. Yeah, that's the news done. [00:25:35] Let's get into the cloud news, James and his first one I want to talk about has nothing to do at the cloud at all, ever. However, it could, it could, because if you have data in the cloud, you're going to need it on your device. And a great way to do that is with SQL Lite and. And any framework, did you know you could run entity framework? [00:25:55] Um, I knew that it was the thing that you could maybe do [00:26:00] that perhaps some people have tried. Thank you for bringing that up. Some people have tried because you know what? We have a quick start out there. Right. And go ahead and follow that quick start. But the, the experience of running entity framework on device on, uh, with, with Samarin could be better. [00:26:18] And I mean, I'll just be blunt. It could be better, you know, a little bit slow. It works, but it's a little bit slow. And what we need are folks that come out and just, you know, kind of give us their experience, give us some, a reproduction of where things are actually slow, where, where they hit it in their code and that'll help the team make it better. [00:26:37] So this is actually to say, Hey, we have a quick start. Here's how you can actually get started, get up and using it. And once you do. Help us help us help you, you know? So it's just, yeah. One of those things and you can use on any framework, it works just fine, but let's make it better. So yeah, we can. And um, so last [00:27:00] month, my favorite, um, Cloud service. [00:27:03] My new favorite Azure service was Azure SQL. I knew I had to, I had to pick a new favorite for this month, but I'll keep it with Azure SQL now. Um, and one of the reasons why it's still my new favorite Azure service is because the team behind it just released 61. Videos for beginners, get to know Azure SQL 61 videos. [00:27:27] Wow. That's a lot of videos. Yeah. So remember what I said that we seem to have more time doing a video content now. Yeah, it seems, it seems that way, but these aren't long videos. They're like broken down in like five to 10 minute chunks. So, I mean, they're, they're easy to watch if you're, you know, just need a break from your work five, 10 minutes or watch over. [00:27:45] Uh, during your lunch break or whatnot, but it's a great way to learn a ton about Azure SQL, um, for both developers or if you want to learn it for a mom, like an it pro perspective as well, 61 of them, you're going to find something in there that you didn't know before, and they [00:28:00] get ramped up on something and just the pure number of them. [00:28:03] Wow. Check it out. There's a lot of work that went behind that. So like that definitely, definitely check it out. Yup. And the other thing, which is about to become my new Azure. Favorite Azure service and happens to be the Azure service of the month. Can you guess what it is, James? Can you guess? I'm, I'm looking at it currently, but not, I can't guess. [00:28:27] I don't know. What is it? Yes. We have notes for the podcast and is written right there. It's Azure app configuration. What is it? What is it? Good question. Alright. So this kind of actually makes, I'm glad we picked it because it fits right in with this, um, the microservice thing that we were talking about before, because a lot of times what you're going to have with your microservices, they're going to be deployed. [00:28:52] All over the place. And not only that is that okay. A lot of the microservices are going to need the same, um, like database [00:29:00] connection strings. So app configurations are things like database connection, strings, or other configuration values. Right. And so what the Azure app configuration service does is that it gives you like a centralized place where you can, um, Handle all these trumps. [00:29:22] So it's like a centralized administrative place for him. And you can dynamically change these things in real time too. And where your, um, microservices or whatnot are running from they'll automatically pick them up and then you conversion them. You can put them with labels as well. You get that nice UI to run them through. [00:29:40] And so it's this nice centralized place where you can control all your application settings. And have a bunch of different, and I'm always saying microservices, but it could be VMs or whatnot. Be able to go in and grab them all from one a single smile. Cause he could, they could be spread out all over. [00:29:59] And it's really hard, like, [00:30:00] Oh, totally forgot that I have this one service outing and I was in North Europe and I forgot about it. And I was pulling off the wrong database when I needed to change it. One spot done and done. So yeah, you never want to have secrets coded into your app either. So this is a great place for it. [00:30:18] And it integrates with key vault, which might be my favorite service next month. So. Nice next podcast is writing itself. That's what we do. That's what we do here. I love it. That was the check that as well. Cause you're right. Sometimes your stuff's all over the place. You just want to bring it together. [00:30:35] Well, I love it. All right. Well that gets us to our pick of the pod. What you got for is Matt. Alright, so I have been doing, and I shouldn't be admitting this. Here is some web development lately. Oh my gosh. I know, I know. I feel bad about it too. However, I've been mixing in some of my. Previous favorite things about it identity. [00:30:55] And one of them, the library that had been using a lot is called the Microsoft dot [00:31:00] identity dot web library. Alright, so what this thing does, it kind of wraps up M cell. And makes it super easy to do so you kind of cut. It plugs, right? The whole asp.net, um, middleware and it's. So you get to use all, all the goodness that that metalware does. [00:31:19] So you don't have, we'll have to replace a lot of your code. You do replace a couple things like the initial organization. Um, it's a diff a different, uh, function that you're calling to initialize it, but it makes it easier. And you're using M cell on the backend and you get a whole bunch of, um, I'm gonna say easiness to it. [00:31:35] So it's like an update to what's currently in there and B to C you get to use Azure. It just works. It just works. So. Yeah, it's in preview right now. So it's not out there for general availability, but, um, nougat packages. There's a nice Wiki over on that, where they're developing it on I'm on a get hub. So put links in there and [00:32:00] their Wiki. [00:32:00] He's great at actually it takes you through step by step, how to use it, and they're putting new templates into the dotnet run experience. So if you do a. Not.net, run.net new. So if you want to create a web application, so, so you do.net, new web app. You can do that net new web app and or you put your dash a AAU for authentication. [00:32:22] It's going to build it up using the identity framework or this Microsoft, that identity, that web automatically for you. So like, like I said, that's not there yet because it's still preview, but that's where they're going to so new templates. You don't want to have to worry about switching anything out at all. [00:32:41] If a Greenfield app. Super cool. And it's. Like the latest and greatest it uses themsel, but you don't have to worry about all the getting down and dirty and the details. Nice. Nice. I like it. Um, I'm going to go with, I mentioned [00:33:00] earlier, our good friend, Steven pancake view of 2.0, adds all sorts of new stuff. [00:33:05] The added tons of bondable gradient stops, um, a gradient angle. On to it. Ed Macco as support as well. He has a brand new API for borders and shadows, super duper rad, um, source link support, which is great. Um, yeah, all sorts of good stuff in there. It's completely open source as well. It really plays super well with, uh, the sharp NATO suite. [00:33:29] Um, in general, I think they're going to be doing some collaboration in general. So definitely again, I just kind of continue to just to pick this work, but it's super good. Um, and, um, maybe that's my single page, but I have another page, which is the Xamarin forms, community toolkit. Have you heard about this? [00:33:46] I have heard about this. Why don't you fill as soon as you fill the listeners in though, or refresh my memory even. Yeah. So this thing has gone up and down and up and down for forever 10 years, five years, 125 years. [00:34:00] Uh, now the communities it's, it's in the name community, it's just like, there's a windows community toolkit. [00:34:05] There is a WPF community tool kit. There's all sorts of things. Why not have a Xamarin forms based community toolkit? So the Xamarin community toolkit. Run by the community, uh, which is rad, um, oversight from some Xamarin, um, team members, then Microsoft team members, even not just at Microsoft, but the idea here is to add a bunch of helpers to make Xamarin forms, development, uh, delightful things that you might just have to write yourself, like behaviors, converters. [00:34:35] And in fact, they have like, 20 different effects and, um, converters like multi converter, not equal converter text case, converter, all sorts of good things, following best practices, things that, you know, you read in the docs and you've got to copy and paste, not just use this in here. And then they also have some views. [00:34:51] So they have a new avatar view and a range slider view, and they're adding more controls and things to it. So it's just getting the off the ground right now. But if you want to [00:35:00] contribute, maybe you have a control that you've been building and using for a while. Uh, and you want to put it in here, so put it in there and get it in there. [00:35:09] There's all sorts of stuff. And there's a sample, um, and things like that. So give it a look. It's super cool. Nice. But it sounds like the community toolkit could be a source of future pick of the pods, the pods. Yep, exactly. Exactly. So there you go. That's it, Jay August. Yeah, we did it. Well, we made it through, we're almost done with the whole year of podcast. [00:35:36] Oh, my goodness two. There's the way down. All. Alright, well, Matt, what I was going to do it for this week's pod, you can find us everywhere on the internet. I'm at James Monta Magno on Twitter, GitHub and Twitch. You're at code mill. Matt, is that correct? Code mill, Matt that's correct. Dale AB. It's still there. [00:35:53] It will be wherever you end up on Twitter and on get up. Yeah, they're there. and.com and.com. [00:36:00] Look at that. Oh my goodness. Wow. Assistant branding. That's that's the key for good personal brand tune in for my next code mail. Matt talks about branding. I like it. Talk about branding. I'll talk about branding. [00:36:11] I love branding. All right, well, that's gonna do it for this week's podcast. Thanks everyone for tuning in. And until next time, this has been your Xamarin podcast.