00:00:10 Matt Welcome back everyone to the Xamarin podcast, keeping you up to date with the latest and greatest in mobile development. For Xamarin developers, covering the world of xamarin.net Azure and more. I am Matt soak up. 00:00:22 James And I'm James Montemagno, and we of course have our special guests with us, David Orr. Now how's it going, David? It's going well. 00:00:28 David It's going well. Thank you very much. How are you? 00:00:30 James Great, I don't think you're a special guest anymore. I think you're just official third Co. 00:00:35 James Host, correct? 00:00:36 David I I am I am a yeah official 3rd until net Maui launches and then you have the right or the option to kick me off. 00:00:43 James Yeah, there we go. I think we need to update the intro to Matt to say in mobiledevelopmentfor.net developers including the world of Xamarin, Donna, Maui Azure and more probably. 00:00:54 Matt Absolutely yeah we should. 00:00:55 David Ever evolving ever evolving? 00:00:57 James Yeah, it's it's all. It's all happening. 00:01:00 James David and we had build on the way which I saw some of your demo and I'm very, very excited about it. I'm ready to update all the things, but I don't think we can get there yet. But what is going on in the world of Dot Net Maui, David? 00:01:13 David Yeah, so preview three has shipped and is out there in the public and that added Win UI 3 project reunion to the mix. So now we have all four platforms there and we've been working hard. The engineering team has been crushing it to deliver Preview 4. 00:01:28 David And preview four will include new templates for Maui and Blazer Desktop, which is very exciting and we were. We are introducing splash screen support and raw asset support to single projects. So splash screen. Essentially you can declare your foreground image and your background image. 00:01:48 David Or color. 00:01:49 David And then raw assets you can include things like what you would normally use an embedded resource for, and the. The cool thing here for both of those is we translate these things to what the native platforms expect, whereas an embedded resource would be something that kind of bloats your cross platform library and isn't as. 00:02:09 David Performant memory efficient, so I'm excited to see those two new things come in. 00:02:14 David A content page and navigation page with navigation bar are now included in net Maui, so you'll see in the demos for build that I'm able to actually navigate now which you weren't able to do before. On that same note, Shellwork has begun, but Shell is not yet included in Preview 4. That's going to be a preview. 00:02:34 David Five thing. 00:02:35 David Not I. 00:02:35 David 00:02:35 David OK, it's very close. It's like on the on the cusp we have layout updates for the compatibility layouts, Flex layout, grid stack layout, 'cause in my demos I used a bunch of flex layouts and when we ported that to the Maui code we realized it crashed. So hey, that's part of that's. 00:02:55 David Part of previews, and that's why we do these things. So exciting news. I had to suffer that so that you developers don't have to suffer that. So Preview 4 that's all fixed. It's all good to go. 00:03:06 David And and as part of Preview Four also, I mentioned we have templates for Blazer Desktop, which also means we have a Blazer Webview control. So this is what really makes that whole experience work that you can bring your Blazer app directly into a Maui application and all that C sharp.net goodness is shared. 00:03:27 David There's really no. 00:03:28 David Boundary that you have to Pierce or jump over or work around to get your web app talking to the native platforms. It's a very seamless experience, so it's really cool and we have that demo as well at build and all that code is going to be made available for the demo so you can look forward to a nice good looking Maui plus. 00:03:48 David Blazer app that you can download and explore. 00:03:51 David Uhm, something else. I wanted to update everybody on we have been speaking with the Xamarin Community Toolkit maintainers about how and when we support.net Maui. I think I may have mentioned this previously, or maybe it was part of the ASK Me Anything segment that we did and the first step is going to be a compatibility package. 00:04:11 David Based on top of the zammin forms. 00:04:13 David Stuff and then. Beyond that there will be a new repository with Maui specific things where they start porting the renderer. Work to handlers. 00:04:22 David And all that sort of thing. 00:04:23 James It's very cool, yeah? 00:04:23 James It's very cool. 00:04:24 David Yeah, so most of that is is kind of in progress in flight and already happened preview Five. We have a whole new Gallery app underway. We have tons of work in the handlers and controls and so we'll see. Kind of how preview 5 shapes up next podcast will give you a full dump on what you can expect to. 00:04:44 David Use their C sharp hot reload XAML hot reload. Many of those experiences will work with Preview 4 as well to some degree, and they'll just get better and better with the with the new releases. So there is your dot net Maui update. 00:05:00 James Very cool and like the preview for you said it's not out yet that's in the build time frame is something like that very. 00:05:05 David Yes, exactly exactly. 00:05:08 Speaker 4 No. 00:05:08 James And you have some sessions that build. Is that correct or what's going on with? 00:05:11 David Bill, which you got? Yeah, so there are essentially three sessions for buildthatcover.net Maui content and Blazer. So there's the all up.net update from Scott Hunter where we have several demos that showcase all. Net Maui hot reload blazer. 00:05:28 David Things then we have an on demand session which is a longer deeper dive. So my I don't know four or five minute demo goes to 15 minutes and we go deeper into the architectural things. 00:05:41 David And then we have an expert panel where myself and Daniel Roth and Dimitri Leighland and others I don't remember who all is on the panel. Scott Hunter will be there are are going to be live answering questions so that again is a live session during build, so that'll be nice. 00:05:52 Speaker 4 Here. 00:06:01 David Yeah, so we have those three main sessions and then you know there will be tons of blogging and smaller video related content that we'll work on between now and then as well. 00:06:11 James Beautiful. It's a super exciting time. I know I've made some videos on the previews as they expand and based on what I've seen from hopping into some of the builds planning, I'm very exciting because I feel like a lot of these previews upcoming or is going to start to start to make the change for developers and be able to test a lot more with a lot of the features that you said. 00:06:31 James Work on. 00:06:32 James Thing and it's exciting to to continue on this journey and I love the back Compat story as well because I know some of my apps all. Some of the easier ones. I may try to flip over or some of the other ones. I may not. It just kind of depends and I think that's a nice story for developers is that you get to pick and choose on your timeline and and you know the the libraries. 00:06:52 James That are out there today will continue to work and be maintained and things like that. And we'll move over to 'cause. I think the Xamarin Community Toolkit has been really awesome. I'll talk about some updates that I worked with Shane and Rachel from the Xamarin forms dot Amaui team on. It's really cool to see a lot of stuff in there. 00:07:11 James Awesome yeah. 00:07:13 James Cool, well thank you David. So much for the update, super appreciate it. 00:07:16 David No problem, I will see you next month, alright? 00:07:19 James Well, we have a lot of exciting stuff with build and Donna Amalia, but there are new updates to Visual Studio out that you can enjoy today. What's going on in the world of Visual Studio map? 00:07:29 Matt You know what Visual Studio 16.10 Preview Two has updated and as one would expect with Visual Studio has a lot of tooling updates in it and one of them that I really like here is that you can automatically insert call methods when scrolling through. 00:07:47 Matt Now what does that mean when the Intellisense pulls up? James, you know. So a lot of times you're calling a method has a bunch of overrides on it, and the Intellisense pops up and a lot you have to kind of go through and see. Like all right, we have three parameters in this method, and this method has four parameters, the other one has five, and you're honestly I have to squint to see all these you know in there. 00:08:07 Matt Well, with the new the new one and what we have and there actually puts it right in the code editor. 00:08:13 Matt For you, so it's. 00:08:14 Matt Picker type and it puts like default methods in there as well and you just tab and boom, there it is and then you can go through and change things as as you would so that everybody are calling it insert column methods and it's pretty cool. I mean it makes your I guess your inner dev loop a little bit easier and it actually makes it easier to see. 00:08:34 Matt What the method signatures look. 00:08:36 Matt Like and so yeah, I really like it. You have to turn it on in the options of Visual Studio so it's not enabled by default, but when you do, it's super nice to have. And another thing that I think is really cool is visual inheritance. Change chains, visual inheritance chains. So what this is so a lot of times you're using a class. 00:08:57 Matt That is inherited from another class that's inherited from a class before, so you have a bunch of these inheritance chains, and so this visual inheritance chains feature will allow you to visualize that's over. And what's that? I always forget James, what's it on the left hand sides at the gutter of Visual Studio? What are we calling that over there? 00:09:14 James I, I think the gutter kind of like yeah, like a view of your house. If you have like a gutter where the water 00:09:19 Matt Goes down, yeah, there you go. It's the downspout. 00:09:21 Matt It's the downspout of Visual Studio. There you. 00:09:22 James Video. 00:09:24 Matt Go so over there is what you can see then is essentially a little pop up that shows you are right. Class bar enables enable or enables inherits from class Foo. 00:09:35 Matt Which in Harrods from class. 00:09:36 Matt This base class and also implements these interfaces as well so you can see the full hierarchy of what's going on there so you know what essentially what you're dealing with, so that's pretty neat and as well as there's some amongst like some C++ features and such. There's also some new container features there. 00:09:56 Matt So if you're running some containers on your back end and so on, so a lot of tooling updates with VS 16.10 Preview 2 and and another thing that's coming out James is Visual Studio 2022, which is not. It's not out. 00:10:11 Speaker 4 Do. 00:10:13 Matt Yet and but it's coming, probably in 2022. I would imagine, since that's what we're naming it. And the big thing here James is that it's going to be 64 bit. 00:10:25 James Ooh, I like that. 00:10:27 Matt Yeah, you know what that means is that you're not going to run out of memory anymore, so I never ran out of memory. 00:10:33 Matt With Visual Studio 16, but I'd imagine when you start having a lot of projects in there that you might and or you're doing a lot of debugging at the same time. But what happened is that they actually tested this thing with up to 1600 projects and 300,000 files all open at the same time. 00:10:54 Matt Have you ever run a nap with that mini? 00:10:54 James Wow no, no no me neither but. 00:10:58 Matt Mainly, but no 64 bit and it worked just fine with that. So I mean you have a lot more memory available to you and machines have just a ton of memory Now so you're good to go there. And another cool thing that they have with Visual Studio 2022 are better icons for readability. So the Accessibility for it. It's improved a new default. 00:11:19 Matt Font for coding, called Cascadia Code and the cool thing about that is that it's available now for downloading, and I'll put a link to the shown in the show notes of where you can actually go in. 00:11:29 Matt Get it, so that's pretty neat thumb, so it's going to be a refresh UI. A little better contrast on the icons and things. A little look a little fresher and they're a little bit easier for you to see. So super cool there and little more features is that we have in. There are some like if you're developing an app for Azure, there's now, like my book column like. 00:11:50 Matt Getting started repositories. So let's say you want to get started with this Azure feature. 00:11:56 Matt There's gonna be a repository that you can go out there and it's like a starter app for a certain app template so you know, kind of like they were correct. Guidance those like a pattern that you can use to use this Azure feature with it. And it's going to be highly opinionated, so it's kind of going to push you off in the right direction to do it, so that's that's. 00:12:16 Matt Got a nice way to go 'cause Azure has so many features and it's kind of overwhelming of how do you use this and. 00:12:23 Matt There you go, now you're now you're going to know because there's actually a feature repo with it with the correct application. And of course it's going to have full support for. Net sixand.net Maui, which it better, right? And it's going to also support.net reload and all this is super neat. It's going to have. 00:12:43 Matt When you're doing live share, you're gonna be able to do some text chatting with it too. So Yep, Sir, if you're doing some debugging. 00:12:47 James Got wise. 00:12:51 Matt You can Mail actually text chat right within it and intellicode the one thing that I'm going to rely on to write all my apps going forward. The AI for it keeps on getting better and better so. 00:13:04 Matt Yeah, Visual Studio 2022, the next iteration and so are we going to be content. Is that going to be like Visual Studio 17 or is that Visual Studio 18.1? Do you know what the. 00:13:14 Matt Numbering for that is. 00:13:15 James Probably 17 I assume. I think. I think it just continues to increment every single time. Yeah, and we'll see. I don't know what they'll do with Visual Studio for Mac Visual Studio for Mac. Is getting updates for Visual Studio 2022 for Mac. It's going to complete overhaul of the user interface using 100% Native Mac OS user interface that will come with better performance and reliability. 00:13:16 Speaker 4 7. 00:13:20 Speaker 4 OK. 00:13:36 James There's been pieces and chunks that have been updated overtime, but it's also going to just completely re architect from the ground up there. It's going to have built in Mac OS Accessibility features as well, which is kind of nice using those native UI element. 00:13:52 James It's there's going to be new menu updates, terminology updates, so it's more consistent with the Windows version, and Additionally it is going to get a brand new Git experience from Visual Studio, which I'm very excited for because in Visual Studio 1610 on Windows the you know get update as they get stuff has all been turned on there. 00:14:12 James And make more updates to it and I simply love it all to get productivity features so they're all going to come over to Visual Studio for Mac and a whole lot more. And of course we will figure out when this thing releases at some point. Who knows, it's a mystery. Still more information at some point in the future. 00:14:29 Matt Keeping people on the edge of their seat. 00:14:32 James Yes, exactly, but do not fear. If you're looking for some updates over in the world of Xamarin, it's a pretty exciting time. Right now we have this sort of unofficial. My team does. Kind of unofficial themes where our team like focuses on stuff, and we've been focusing a lot on Accessibility. 00:14:50 James Study and highlighting some of the amazing work that you can do to make your apps more accessible and actually Rachel from the Donna Maui team and Xamarin team wrote this amazing blog post called The Journey to Accessible Apps, which is all about what is Accessibility? Why you should care about Accessibility? What does Accessibility look like? 00:15:10 James How do you approach making accessible applications how you turn on screen readers and color contrast checkers? 00:15:18 James What does it mean to to kind of have Accessibility standards and guidelines for your company or for for other places and and what's nice about it is that she also highlighted all of the new Accessibility features in Maui that are going to be coming. 00:15:38 James And she joined me on the Xamarin show to talk about everything so demo ING what you can do today, how you can start testing today and Additionally what you can do in the future and on top of that, what's been really cool is I collaborated with Shane from the Xamarin Forms and Donna Maui team and Rachel. 00:15:59 James On a brand new Microsoft Learn module all about Accessibility called create accessible apps with Xamarin forms, which is quite cool and it will walk you through all about what Accessibility is, what it means for mobile application develop. 00:16:13 James I meant how do you? What are screen readers? How do you enable screen readers? How do you leverage Xamarin forms automation properties to make your apps more accessible? How do you order content in your application? And it's a really nice you know, quick sort of walk through and you know if you've never used a screen reader to test. 00:16:33 James Rap, it's totally worth it, and there's little tweaks that you can make your in there and it walks you all through and you get a badge at the end, which is really cool. So definitely give that a look. And on top of that. 00:16:46 James One thing that Rachel was talking about in the video that is on YouTube in Channel 9 that will link to on the Xamarin show is she talked about some of the work that Shane had been experimenting with her on. When it comes to some of the down and Maui work and he has this repo that sort of added some new controls. 00:17:06 James Some new effects and what's cool about it? 00:17:10 James Is that, uh, I worked with Gerald and and uh, and Rachel and Shane to get this into the Xamarin Community Toolkit. So this is really nice because the Xamarin Community Toolkit actually made accessible 'cause you couldn't use screen readers with it for some reason. 00:17:31 James But we we totally updated and got it working, which is cool and then we added in the new semantic order view and a semantic effect router, which means a few things. What it enables you to do is. 00:17:46 James Is get more granular control over what items are inside of the Accessibility tree if you will so often the problem. So the problem here is that how the default Xamarin forms works. Is everything on the. 00:18:05 James Page defaults to like 0 index as it goes through and it kind of makes it hard to set indexes inside of like a stack layout or a grid. If you have multiple stack layouts, you kind of want to control the order inside of them instead of in this larger view, so a semantic order view allows you to basically confine. 00:18:26 James Uhm, the ordering? 00:18:28 James Uhm, specifically inside of inside of a layout. So if you have multiple stack layouts, you wrap it in a semantic order view and then you can define the order just for that stack layout instead of in for the entire page, which is nice. And then there is also something called the semantic effect with a heading level. 00:18:48 James And there's a few other things like a description and things like that that add more Accessibility feature. 00:18:53 James But the heading level is really important for Android, iOS and also on Windows where there's multiple heading levels that enable you to again give more priority to the operating system when it is doing screen readers and highlighting things on the screen as well. So there's lots of cool things built right into this. 00:19:13 James So if you're looking to make your apps more accessible, give that a look. It's been merged in and I think it's going to be released. 00:19:18 James East 00:19:19 James Hopefully by the time this podcast is out, so it's in pre-release, at least right now. So in the pre one, and Nougat that just released a few days ago. So give that a look. It's really cool to learn more about Accessibility and I've been looking at my applications and running the things that I've been talking about and trying to make them more accessible so it's quite nice. 00:19:38 Matt Yeah, I love that a lot of times Accessibility is almost an afterthought, which it should not be mean. I'm always guilty of that too. When I created a lot of apps, but uhm, yeah, everybody could use more Accessibility. Whether you realize it or not, and. 00:19:51 Matt Actually, last week I believe it was Microsoft Randir Ability Summit and which talks a lot about Accessibility in general, and I'll put a link to the YouTube page where they where we have a lot of the sessions now online for it where there's like Accessibility 101 stuff on it, so it's not necessarily related to mobile development, but it's. 00:20:11 Matt Accessibility in the general sense, and so a lot of interesting stuff. 00:20:15 James Up there totally. 00:20:18 Matt Alright, so a little bit of cloud news James UM, so what's one thing that shouldn't say it being in the cloud organization Azure Organization? But what's one thing that you really always want to do when you're using something in the cloud is that you want to reduce the costs of it? 00:20:35 James Oh yes, make it cheaper. Yes I love it, yes. 00:20:37 Matt Make it cheaper. Yes, Yep. Once one of the great things about the cloud, you can make it cheaper. Only use it when you want. 00:20:43 Matt Two so on on Azure Friday recently Hanselman had somebody from the Azure blob storage team on where they actually talked about. Optimizing your costs with blob storage and so not only did they talk about optimizing the costs, they went through what Azure blob storage all is. 00:21:03 Matt And so the quick answer is, well, you just put large binary files there, but it's a whole lot more than that too. 00:21:09 Matt And so, but what the meat of it was, is that they get down into blob storage, has a lot of different pricing tiers, and so it can be a little bit dumb. I guess overwhelming when you see all these pricing tiers like I'm just going to take the the standard one. You don't really click on premium ever. 'cause premium means high pricing. A lot of times little premium. 00:21:29 Matt Can actually be cheaper than the standard here, depending on your workload and So what they go through here is not only explaining what each tier gives you, but also optimizing when each tier might be cheaper. Depending on your use case. 00:21:45 Matt So it's a totally interesting video. It goes about 20 minutes, but you know it's you know. I mean, depending on your capacity or how many transactions, or whether you need redundancy, even it's totally worth it to take a view so you can optimize your costs when you're using BLOB storage and blob storage. Actually, I mean it underlies. 00:22:05 Matt Azure, I mean Azure itself, uses blob storage and a lot of our apps that we would write, meaning the the one that you always think about is getting images from somewhere that's all blob storage is really a fundamental. 00:22:17 Matt Fundamental thing out there. So yeah, totally check it out, it's super interesting. 00:22:21 James Very cool yeah. I remember when I was setting up my blob storage I was really thinking about it. 'cause there's different hots and colds and this and that for like you know the the different where you're going to use it for. So really, based on your use case it's super important. Like put a little bit of time consideration in there. 00:22:37 Matt Exactly and a lot of times you say, well, I'm just going to go with the standard one. I'm going to go with the defaults because that must be the cheapest, but maybe it's not. 00:22:46 Matt So, and another thing that I wanted to talk about is recently I worked with Justin you on my team to create a new one module talking about Azure API management and Open API enabled web API's, ASP net core APIs and deploying those from a Visual Studio. 00:23:06 Matt Over to API management. So let's take a quick second to talk about what Azure API management is. It's essentially you can think of it as a portal over your existing web API's. 00:23:18 Matt So let's say you deploy your Web API to anywhere, could be to Azure could be to like your on Prem hosting so you have an API out there and So what Azure API management does is that it puts this wrapper like an admin counts console over the top of it. So I mean if you're if your business like is API centric. 00:23:38 Matt Or even if you're providing API's either internally or externally, API management gives you like this like layer of management over the top of it, so you can like set up routes to the backends when people need to access it. Or like wait. So let's say you have a business like your. 00:23:52 Matt Limiting 00:23:52 Matt 00:23:55 Matt Doing weather forecasts and like you can get the current days, conditions or future conditions and you have a free layer. So you want to have rate limiting and usage quotas for people who aren't not paying for it yet. You can set that up with Azure API management so it gives you this management layer and you can do keys and logs and all that other good stuff so. 00:24:15 Matt That's what that is. So what this learn module does it's talks about how you can use Visual Studio to one make your Web API open API, enable using a swagger tooling set. 00:24:28 Matt And then use Visual Studio to deploy it to API management all within Visual Studio. So you're not switching all around using a bunch of different studio tools. Visual Studio handles it all, so yeah, super neat becomes actually super easy once you know about it and really cool API management. 00:24:48 Matt Might be one of my favorite. 00:24:50 Matt Favorite things ever. Now that I know about it. 00:24:53 James So once you know you have anything. 00:24:55 James Then you can jump anything. 00:24:55 James 00:24:58 Matt For sure. 00:24:59 Matt And James I know you've probably been involved with it, but if you haven't, do you know about the csharp language? Highlight videos that we've been doing lately. 00:25:09 James Oh yeah, I'm super big fan of these. In fact, I remember Cecil and Kendra and I think Marion Jeannie put out a few of these few years ago and I had reached out about actually doing my own series before I found these and I think Gomez from Channel 9. I'm on TV. She was telling it like all these these already exist. Sounds like what? 00:25:28 James I got with Cecil and Kendra and Jamie and Myra and came up with his plan of just spraying tons of C sharp language highlight features. Short videos 2 to 3 minutes talking about how all the awesome features of C sharp work. And there's like a bunch of them out now, correct? 00:25:46 James Man, yeah, there's. 00:25:48 Matt Way more than I thought. I mean, there's at least I think I'm going to say eight out and we have more than eight recorded. We're just kind of rolling them out one at a time, but I think there's at least eight of them out there right now. There might be more. 00:26:00 Matt But yeah, and what I like about him is being. I'm going to say it an old person working with C sharp a lot of times I don't use the latest and greatest features. I stick to what I know it works. I stick to it and what these videos do. They're short. They're like underneath. 5 minutes is that they talk about, you know, some of the newer. 00:26:20 Matt Features like default interface methods or pattern matching with tuples or properties and so it's neat that you learn about it five minutes and then you can use it and so it's you can't. You don't know what you don't know until you know and that's what these videos are great about. 00:26:36 James Exactly exactly, oh man, yeah I I love it. There's about. 00:26:43 James How many more coming? Uh, I think you're right. I think there's another like 20 or 30 coming. I think the plan was to try to get a year's worth so we could release one every single week and keep keep the fun comment which is going in fact. And if you're looking for more C sharp stuff, that team actually just launched a brand new C Sharp web page on the dot net website. You go to C sharp dev C dot dev. 00:27:05 James C sharp like. See the letter CS ARP dash. 00:27:11 James Love that will bring you to the new C sharp page where you learn all about C sharp. You can learn things and try things in the browser and then head over to Microsoft. Learn where there are dozens upon dozens of C sharp tutorials and modules that you can do everything in the browser completely for all your learning. 00:27:31 James And everything like that. Or you can watch videos and do all these different things like that, so definitely. 00:27:35 James Give it a look. That was a pretty awesome, uh thing that came out. If you're looking to do more on top of that, you can actually go and check out the let's Learn net series. We just recently did that. Jamie from my team runs out. These are two hour events that happen. 00:27:56 James Once a month, usually around the end of the month, they're available on Channel 9 and on YouTube as well. There's one on Web API, so we're talking about the API management stuff like you're talking about earlier. There's one on microservices and then last month was on C sharp this month on Accessibility. So give those a look. They're live like walking through, you know. 00:28:16 James Targeting brand new developers. If you have, you know team members or yourself or just getting into C sharp, give those a look or you're interested in micro services or Web API Accessibility. 00:28:25 James Give it a look, it's really cool. Or join us live. Head over to that page and you can find all information for it. It's down in the show notes. So much fun stuff Matt. 00:28:32 Matt Yeah, and actually talking about things that you might not know about till you know about it like try dot dot net right? I mean that's one of the things that lets you run C sharp in a browser and you can actually just go to the website itself and mess around with C sharp without having to. 00:28:48 Matt Move up Visual Studio or anything so it's actually kind of. I would say it's like a ripple in in the browser. Readable you a print engine so. 00:28:54 James Totally. 00:28:56 Matt Yeah. 00:28:56 Matt 00:28:57 Matt It's pretty cool. Yeah, pretty cool. 00:29:00 Matt So that brings us to the Azure service of the month, and it's not going to be Azure API management. I'm actually going to expand my horizons and not talk about something we already talked about, but it is kind of similar to in the idea that it's a. 00:29:17 Matt Service that spans other services. It's like a management service and it's on Azure IoT Central and so this is the I really am proud of myself with the example that we have here, but what? What is Azure IoT central? It's it's like an easy monitoring and management of remote devices like IO T. 00:29:37 Matt Devices so it brings together several. 00:29:41 Matt Azure IoT services together underneath 11 hood or one roof, and so you like IoT Hub or Azure Maps even or Azure IoT edge and Time series Azure IoT Time series insights. So it gives you a little insights on what's going on, so you have all these various IoT centric Azure services. 00:30:02 Matt This brings them into one spot so you can monitor and manage them all together. OK, so it's kind of like Azure API management in that respect and that now you have everything in one spot all right now. 00:30:13 Speaker 4 Right? 00:30:13 Speaker 4 00:30:15 Matt Kind of seems weird, but here comes the example that kind of helps bring it all together. Imagine James that you have a fleet of ice cream trucks, not so far fetched. I mean, I know you're kind of getting into the ice cream business, so you have a fleet of them. These are all essentially IO. T you have a little IoT device on there so you can see. 00:30:24 James OK. 00:30:26 James Now realistic. 00:30:28 Speaker 4 Millimeter. 00:30:35 Matt Where they are on a map, you're the IO where you're the ice cream manager and so you want to make sure they can get to the customers on time to deliver the ice cream. 00:30:43 Matt But what happens if a truck fails? It runs out of gas, gets a flat tire. You either want to be able to get it to the nearest customer, perhaps, or have another truck come and pick up the contents to bring it to the nearest customer. Or just say you know what I'm going to. Just open it up for the public to come and get free ice cream. Maybe this IoT central. 00:31:03 Matt Helps you do that helps you make you know like real time decisions based on where it is based on where all your customers or whatever happen. 00:31:10 Matt And B and so it's like this real time management service, so it's like it's like the central IoT thing. And what else is cool about it? They do have a bunch of templates for getting started in different vertical industries like retail, so you can manage like a distribution center or something energy. So like smart meters and even we are working on a. 00:31:31 Matt Xamarin component for it, which is why I wanted to bring it all up. Is that right now we're working on some Xamarin goodness for it, which you'll be able to download on GitHub. We're putting the final touches on it now, so probably build time. It will be out. 00:31:45 Speaker 4 There. 00:31:46 Matt Zamarin for IoT central. It's coming, yeah, yeah. 00:31:46 Speaker 4 Fluff. 00:31:49 James Awesome, very cool. That's awesome. I love it. Lots of IoT goodness that I've talked about in the past. I'm excited to see that come to life. Well, I could bring it to the end of the podcast. There's a pic of the pod. I'll kick it off since you've been doing all the talking, I'm going to pick our good friend, Frank Krueger, who I podcast with over merge conflicts. SQL Light dash net. 00:32:09 James I recently did a video just talking about databases and you know, offline caching and things like that and a lot of the core architecture of a lot of these things are based off of SQLite raw, which is the underlying C library stuff that has all the bindings and then SQLite net is just the most easiest object. 00:32:29 James Relational mapper and room for the database. If you're looking to have a relational database and set up keys and set up rows and columns. 00:32:38 James Uhm, it gets it done. There's a backing store that I have for Monkey Cache, which is my caching library. A lot of other people use sqlite.net for a bunch of stuff. You're just looking to pull down some data, store it offline, get it inside of a SQL database you put in sqllite.net. It's super simple. There's a synchronous and asynchronous version. 00:32:58 James Of it, and, uh? 00:33:00 James Yeah, supply stash not. I don't know, I just meant I've been using it for the last 8-9 years, so it's pretty sound pretty solid so. 00:33:06 Matt Yeah, it's been. I mean, that's one of the first blog posts I ever written. One was sqllite.net and it's yeah, it's super easy. It's been, it's the venerable sqllite.net. It works. Its first time I ever use it. I couldn't believe how easy it was. It's like what am I doing wrong? It's why is this? 00:33:19 Speaker 4 Yeah. 00:33:21 Matt Working without having to do anything special to. 00:33:24 Matt It there's no, yeah. 00:33:25 James Yeah. 00:33:25 James 00:33:26 Matt You remember you remember using it before Nougat came out. We actually had to copy all the code into it, like Oh yeah, yeah. 00:33:31 James Oh yeah, just copy and paste the whole file is great. 00:33:33 Speaker 4 That's great, yeah. 00:33:33 Speaker 4 That's yeah. 00:33:35 Matt All right, so my pic of the pod is zxing or Z Xing and as from our friend John **** or as we like to come read is that how you pronounce that red VTH bread? Yes. 00:33:44 James Ralph, yes I got this. I call this library zebra crossing. 00:33:49 Matt Zebra caught crossing? Yeah, that's a full name for it. And So what this does as in Zebra Crossing is that it lets you zebras have stripes when all says stripes, barcodes, even QR codes and lets you to from a Xamarin app, scan them and get what they mean underneath so you know if it has like a bunch of numbers. 00:34:08 Matt Or even in the QR code. 00:34:11 Matt Like a website in there, or you can even have a bunch more information than or for QR codes, but super easy you put it into your Xamarin app. It loads up the camera for you and even with Xamarin forms with a full on view like the entire app is taken over by the camera, even has an overlay which you know has like a little line. 00:34:16 Speaker 4 What? 00:34:30 Matt In the middle so that the user knows where exactly to. 00:34:34 Matt Game. 00:34:35 Matt And boom, it is super quick, gets all the information off the off the barcode or QR code or whatever you happen to be using identifies what it's scanned, whether it's a barcode, I had no idea there's a bunch of different barcode types. Zebra Crossing knew it was brings that in. 00:34:51 Speaker 4 Oh yeah. 00:34:55 Matt Brings you know what it says and yeah, really neat. Very handy. I use it in building the Azure IoT Central app because we're going to have a QR code so you can just download it. And yeah, really neat. Love it just. 00:35:09 James Works nice, that's fantastic. Yeah, I always love all sorts of libraries like this and I've been using that for quite a long time. There's there's a lot of optimizations and things like that built in to see it. Definitely give it a look if you're looking to scan some barcodes, but I think it's gonna do for this week Xamarin podcast. Thanks David for being on giving us a dynamically update. Hope everyone has a great Microsoft build. It's free. 00:35:30 James You can just go register. We'll put a link in the show notes go. It's all the stuffs. Free. Catch it all live or on demand up to you. All sorts of good stuff. Matt. Thanks so much for hanging out with me. Hope you have an absolutely amazing day, an awesome build and we'll be back in next month for your Xamarin podcast.