Xamarin Dev Team Garners Community Improvements, Asks for Suggestion Input -- Visual Studio Magazine

Xamarin Dev Team Garners Community Improvements, Asks for Suggestion Input

By David Ramel
11/18/2019

The Xamarin dev team highlighted awards for its recent Hacktoberfest 2019 contest held to garner community improvements to the mobile development platform for coding Android and iOS apps in .NET and C#.

Hacktoberfest 2019 – Xamarin Edition was held to solicit "quality pull requests," defined as "anything that substantially improves the quality of the product," as opposed to simply fixing typos.

This year's contest generated 178 pull requests from 72 contributors, which Samantha Houts said was almost double the respone of last year. Winning participants received stickers, t-shirts and glass trophies.

Houts also highlighted some community suggestions.

"We are always excited to receive contributions resolving bugs or adding small enhancements because those contributions are guaranteed to improve the products for you" she said. "We are equally excited to receive pull requests that contain significant, game-changing suggestions. Suggestion PRs are guaranteed to improve the community by opening discussion." She specifically asked for input on the following "interesting suggestions":

[Spec] CSharpForMarkup #8342: "The goal is to make Xamarin Forms more attractive for additional developer audiences that don't have XAML skills / preference. Developers with XAML skills can also benefit; declarative C# can be very similar to XAML and can offer increased productivity (due to excellent IDE support for C# and no need for language bridging mechanisms)."
Fluent API for initialization of Xamarin.Forms #8220: "What if we were to add a 'Fluent API' for initialization of Xamarin.Forms? Instead of calling several Init methods that are not very intuitive or discoverable, we can use a fluent mechanism.
Based on @jamesmontemagno post
https://montemagno.com/add-asp-net-cores-dependency-injection-into-xamarin-apps-with-hostbuilder/"
Updating DependencyResolver to use TypedParameter #8343: "Updates the Dependency Resolver to take a new TypedParameter. This helps with providing a proper Dependency Injection tie in as containers prefer to know the type a specified instance is for."

"We'd like to hear your opinion on these! Would you use them? Comment now by hitting those links above!" Houts said.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

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