Speaker 1: 00:09 [Inaudible] Speaker 2: 00:10 [Inaudible] Matt: 00:12 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. Xamarin.Net Azure and more. I'm Matt Soucoup and I'm James Montemagno. How's it going buddy? Things are going really well. James Seattle has entered the Autumn season. James: 00:33 Yeah. Welcome. I know we're all worried about snow this fall and this winter and everyone's freaking out and it's windy. It's cold, it's rainy and it's classic Seattle. It's just, it's classic. Welcome to Seattle, be in Seattle. Matt: 00:46 Well, I can guarantee you that Seattle will not get an inch of snow this year because I've already gone and bought a snow shovel. James: 00:52 Oh yeah. Yeah. So you're good. Yeah. If you, if you've prepared, then that means there'll be nothing. It's only when you don't prepare in which everything goes terribly wrong. But yeah, you, you endured last Christmas and holiday season and then that's when the snow was coming down on us. All two inches or so, and the whole city freaked out. But yeah, I think this year we'll do okay. I apparently the city has stocked up on, on supplies. So if the, the snow apocalypse comes yet again, you know, which it won't, then we'll be good to go. But you know, the, you know, it's happening. It's not too bad. It's really not too bad. We, whenever the sun is out, we are walking around. We went to the Sounders game yesterday where we crushed Minnesota yesterday. One nil. And we were out in the stadium. And when you're in the shade it's quite cold. But if you're in the sunlight, which it's not sunny today when we're recording, but if you're in the sunlight, it's, it's spectacular. So that's the recommendation is don't stay inside, just go out and find the sunlight and just bring your laptop and just work from the sunlight. Matt: 01:54 That's right. Yep. Work from the Sounders game. So that's what everybody's doing right now. James: 02:00 I think so. I think so. You know, we made it in the playoffs. Pretty exciting about that. Of course while I did, I'm a season ticket holder. So while I did, you know, reserve all of the playoff games, I will not be around for any of them because I'll be at vs live this week. And then I kick off my a European tour that I'm going on where I'll be at DeVry. And then I worked with tons of user group leaders all over Europe and I think I'm doing like seven or eight talks in 10 days or something like that. We'll put a link in the show notes. If you're in anywhere in Europe, I'm probably close to you at the end of October. Matt: 02:39 The Montemagno tour is going across the Atlantic coming at you this fall. James: 02:44 Yeah. And David was just over there. So it's quite fun. I like to do is I haven't had any international travel for work this year at all. So this is one that I, I said I am going over for DevReach, let's make the most out of crossing the ocean. So I wanted to make sure that I worked with all the great Xamarin user group leaders and Donna user group leaders all over the place. And boom, I'm going to be good to go. We're going to bring lots of monkeys, lots of stickers, lots of good stuff. So yeah, I'm excited. So, and then we've got ignite. It's just a, it's, it's crazy. It is crazy. It's nonstop fun around here. It doesn't end, it doesn't end. It doesn't. And we just literally finished one of the biggest net conferences. Don at comps. I mean basically this is a conference episode, just conferences on conferences. So you were there, it was all happening. You want to break down the latest news? Sure. So Matt: 03:40 We had a couple of announcements area and there are a lot of exciting announcements and the biggest one, well there's a couple of big ones that I like. Of course we announced iOS 13 and Android 10 availability. And of course the biggest one for each of those are the dark modes, right. Got love. Those dark modes. And I'm always making fun of it. So I shouldn't say that. You got to love them, but it's there. It's there to make your users happy. The other one out, iOS 13, it, you know what, and I forgot all about this one until recently is the iPad S availability or the extension onto iOS we should say, but it's, you know, per iPad features. And so that's there too so you can make some real specific IO iPad applications there and also sign in with Apple so that all the authentication goodness that I love is also available with a iOS 13. And then with Android 10, we have as I mentioned, the dark theme and some gestural navigations and now that Microsoft last week I think announced the, all those new form factors for laptops, Android, all bubble support is a nursing you get ready for like next year when we announced all those cool things coming out. And I'm excited for the foldable. James, are you ready for the next generation of mobile applications? James: 05:03 You know, I've been over smart phones for a while, but I'm excited for new smart phones. So you know, I mean smart phones had been the same for a bed. Even the new iPhone 11 pros and all this other there, they're all similar. But I have been waiting for, for something out there and dual screens. There've been tried in the past and a Sony did one and other people have done one a in the past. And I think it's cool that the surface duo is this really awesome device. I set it on on merge conflict with Frank. I said, ah, we're just another podcast. I do. I said, shameless plug, go into your podcast app, merge conflict and you'll find the podcast. Subscribe to that. It's every week, every Monday, midnight, get grab that. So which I did, I told them on the podcast, I said, what's great is that you have the surface Neo device, which is running windows 10 acts a to build windows applications and then you're going to have the surface duo running the latest and greatest Android version optimized foldables, right? James: 05:58 And it was great. As a Donald's developers, you can already build for these platforms. You just, you can already do it and share code across all of them. So as a Xamarin developer, like you're in this great place or you already, you're already good to go. You're Donald's developer, you can write the backend services, you can run the worker services things. I mean in fact not only at Donna calm, like did we announce like the iOS and 13 and Android tempo. We announced down at core three we shared an awesome demo from start to finish of worker services and desktop apps and web apps and mobile apps. Like everyone sharing code. It's a beautiful, lovely day. Matt: 06:32 Yep. And even best to the, you mentioned the, all the sessions that we showed at that knit con and like the whole story from the worker services and the desktop app and of course the mobile app. All those sessions recorded online and more. I was just going through it before there is, gosh, James just like 50 out there already now. I think they're rolling out more every day. And for Xamarin related sessions, I don't are, David [inaudible] has a one out there. John Douglas manuals. Jair has one out there. I have one. You have one. There are all over the place too with mine obviously with, with app center and cloud connected apps. David did Xamarin forms. John did Android. Maddy did development productivity. You were in the keynote so you had the kicked it off with Scott Hunter. I mean we're, Xamarin was well-represented, I would, I would say, which is awesome. Yeah, we're all all James: 07:27 Over the place and on the Xamarin developers, a YouTube channel, I've hand curated a.net comp playlists. Just for all of our listeners, just for you, just for your listeners, no one else's aren't just just for you. So we'll put a link into the show notes for that as well, which is really cool. So yeah, there was all sorts of good stuff. I mean, to me the biggest announcement announcement is that now you can grab Xamarin forms XAML hot reload in the stable version of visual studio 2019 for PC and for Mac 16 three eight. Dot three. It's in there, it's in the box. Matt, you've gotta check a checkbox, but it's in the box. It's still technically in preview, but it ships in the stable channel. I wanna make that very clear. It's, it's in the box. We didn't make it clear enough and a lot of people were like, Oh, I've got to install the preview. James: 08:17 You've got to just say no, it's in the box. It's in the computer. I'm starting to talk like Dan Roth. I just was watching his blazer. He gets so excited about everything and, but no, it's, it's in there. So you install visual studio 16, three on, on the PC or eight dot. Three on the Mac. They have all sorts of new features, brand new IDE, like Tex editor features on the Mac. Super, super good. And you go into tools, options, Xamarin, SAML, hot reload, boom. And what that allows you to do is you're typing your user interface, doing some XAML work, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You hit save, boom, it updates in your running application, you're good to go. And that's how we use XAML user interface, productivity types of XAML. Boom, good to go. It got custom controls, slap them in there, boom, good to go. James: 09:05 Works with everything in it and it has your data associated with it. So if you're on a, if you're on a page that has a list of monkeys or the weather data, it's already gonna be there. So you just hit save and boom, it's already there. It's good to go. That's what I download as part of the keynote, which is cool. Nice. So what you're saying, it's good to go. It's good to go. It's in the box. Now, let's see. I think I said it in preview edition, you know what I mean? And we just want to get the feedback from everybody. So in the next version or so when it goes [inaudible] it's off by default. Now it'll be on by default in the future. We just want to make sure that it's been rung through the gamut, you know what I mean? In, in general. So no, that's [inaudible] Matt: 09:47 [Inaudible] smart move. Cause then in a previous job that I had is that we couldn't ever install anything that was preview. But I guess we kind of snuck in this preview bits with the stable version of visual studio. And really even if you have any trouble with it, just uncheck that check box but keep that checkbox checked because it really is a great tool. And as you mentioned, you're good to go. James: 10:09 So yeah. Yeah. And there's a, there's a bunch of other preview features that are in visual studio that are off by default. So when you go into tools options, at least in the windows version, under environment you'll see preview features and there's one to use compact menu and search bars. There's also another one to use preview additions of Donnette core SDKs. So like there are these preview features that are just available in there and you know, they're, they're off by default. You just turn them on and, and, and eventually, you know, they'll just be on by default. So why not give feedback? And it's the same as, as your dev ops there, feature flags, Azure dev ops, there's 10 or 15 different features. I just turn them all on. It will give me all the new hotness. I don't even care. Just like go to town. Cause I want to get used to it now. And you're in control, which I think is nice. Yup. Matt: 10:58 That's awesome. And so something else that we announced or that we actually just release I guess set during the.net con timeframe. It was a probably a literal ton of.net one-on-one videos and probably 101 of 'em really. And so my colleague Brandon Minick and I did, I think we did 1211 or 12 on Xamarin one Oh one videos. And so these are the ultimate beginner videos for somebody who's brand new to Xamarin development. And we cover what is Samarin. So we talk about really just how Xamarin really split up over cross platforms and how the share code works to actually installing Xamarin both on windows and on Mac [inaudible] and solution architecture. And we walk you all the way through to creating XAML UIs and C-sharp UIs. So it's really cool. It's for the beginners. We have anybody else that, you know, any of our listeners out there who might be interested in Samarin development, point them towards this video series. Matt: 12:01 I'll put the link in the show notes for it, but it's, it's pretty cool how we walk through it. And like I said, it's like a weapon or 12 parts. I'd have to go back and look, but we go over it nice and slow. It's great for the beginners. And what else I like about this a one-on-one video series, James, is that it's all over the place. We cover that greater team, not just Xamarin covers so many different technologies like theirs, that net core one Oh one C sharp on one asp.net one-on-one. So things that that you might not know about, frankly, that you can just go in and get a, get a grasp of like.net for Apache spark. Do you know what Apache spark is? James? Apache spark is like petabytes of data and you do stuff and big data stuff that's, I knew it had to do with data, right. It's, I'm gonna have to go watch this series of find out what we can do with it with.net. Yeah. So that one Oh one series. It's perfect. James: 12:59 It is a super nice series and you're right. I think that was crucial about like you said, there's C-sharp one Oh one Donnette core one Oh one visual studio one Oh one. And to me while I am a C sharp.net developer, obviously focus just on certain technologies. So to get back to the basics is great for me to watch. But I think for anyone new coming to.net, these are amazing. You, I, I watched all of your, your videos and they're great cause they're pretty short, like five to 10 minute episodes so you can pass through them in an afternoon completely free. If you're good at channel nine, you can download them for offline use. They have RSS feeds so you can subscribe to all of them or some of them individually, whatever you want to do which is really, really great. And to even amplify it even more. I saw Hanselman did a blog post announcing like free asp.net core training. As I said, you know, a handsome, I'm just gonna copy you and I said, freeze Amerind video. I was on my blog, just a really amplify and I, and that tweet got like a billion retweets on it. I didn't even do, I didn't even do anything. You, you did all the work. So Matt: 14:00 There you got. Nice. While we appreciate the building and retweets, I get two retweets and it's a win. Like I'll take the afternoon off to celebrate two retweets. So, nice. You know what else I just kind of wanted to mention is that the channel mindset when I was going through does looking at all the one on one series, there's just a ton of great stuff out there. I used to be just getting all my content by reading. I go out and read a bunch of blogs and I'm going to have to jump into like the 2010s down, start watching all the videos we have out there. There's so much good stuff. It's check out channel nine. There's just tons of stuff out there and it's worrying about all the things, all the things, all the things. James: 14:40 Yeah. Well, besides getting started many of our listeners may already, you know, be in, in it and we talked about what we did at dotnet comp. There's probably other Donnette comp events happening all the globe. So we'll link to the donut parties that are going all throughout the end of the year. We did one on campus, a you really, really helped out. Matt we had like 80 people come and we did a live viewing party and then we did special sessions with product team members and like little quirky topics of all sorts, like IOT stuff, which was fun. And there was announcements from all different teams. Like I said, we announced Android 10 iOS 13 XAML hot reload. We also announced two other things. So the first thing was Xamarin hot restart, which was a feature that I demoed on stage. And it's a little bit interesting of a feature. James: 15:34 So normally when you think about how you go to test your code changes you know, you think, okay XAML hot restart. So or sorry. Yeah, so many hots going on XAML hot reload available today in stable under a checkbox, right? So when you modify your XAML user interface, we control Xamarin forms. So we built tooling. So when you hit save updates your UI, now that can't be said for your code changes or even when you need to compile your application. Cause when you need to compile your code, traditionally you need to do a full compilation, you need to do signing and you do all this stuff. Whether you're putting on simulator, on a device and specifically with iOS devices, it's really complicated. You have to do your initial builds, you have to do you're signing, you have to do your different compilation. James: 16:29 So what hot restart does is it is a kind of new deploy mode, then you're, you would be using it without even doing anything. That's the beautiful part of it. It has this name of how it restart, but it's just normal debugger. But debugging that helps you iterate faster. So traditionally, sort of doing all this compilation, all this stuff, what it does is it will enable you to push your code changes to an existing app bundle that's ready to take your code and run it on the device. So you can plug your iPhone into your, your machine, you'll hit debug and boom, it just puts everything over there. It doesn't have to compile, doesn't have to do anything like that and pushes it over. Now what's great though is that you can still use hot reload for your XAML user interface. James: 17:21 But when you make your C sharp code changes, it'll tell you that you're going to need to restart your app because it's code changes that need to be redeployed and redone. So you hit the restart button or stop or start debugging again. And it takes an incremental build and pushes it all over. So now your dev loop is seconds inside of maybe minutes and that's sort of what it does. And it's available for sign up for a private hot a private hot preview. And there we go. That's available all of the hot things later, later this year. So definitely check out the blog posts on it. And I think it demos really well when you end up using it because you just hit debug and it's just faster that that's really what it's doing at the end. Matt: 18:09 Alright, so hot reload, XAML UI, hot restart, C sharp, essentially code changes. Okay. Yup. Gotcha. Yup. James: 18:21 That's what it's doing. And so that's the other thing. So it definitely deep dive into that. But the other cool thing I'll let you talk about is that we have this brand new Xamarin Azure challenge that came out. Matt: 18:31 It's really cool. Yeah, it's really cool. It's spearheaded by our good friend Christos Christos [inaudible] success. And what it is, is that we've been doing a lot of challenges lately. Everybody might remember the visual challenge or the collection view challenge. And so what we did is that we sprinkled some Azure into this one and the app was designed by a Brandon Minnick and along with Christos and what you allows you to do is just takes you step by step through creating a Xamarin app that communicates with some Azure functions. All right? So there's like task one, test two and it breaks it down into sub tasks. Cause then there's a lot of great visuals that go around along with it so it knows what your, so you can follow along and you know that you're on the right steps. And what's really cool about this and because it's a challenge, so everybody wins as long as you get your entry or done by, I believe the end of October 23 coming up here is there's 1000 lucky participants will buy a random drawing is going to get a X-Box gold gift card, $25 worth. That's pretty neat. And then 10 lucky participants, James, the surface headphones. That's yeah. Super cool. That's awesome. But the, but even better, better than all of that is that you get the learn about deploying like functions. You get applying Azure storage, creating a Xamarin app to interact with them. That's the best part about it. You become a winner because you now know more knowledge is knowledge. Is everything James James: 20:13 Powerful. Yeah, that's right. I I did a live stream last week and did the whole thing live and then I took me the entire time only because I kept changing all the source code. I was like, I would do it this way and I like the UI, there'd be this way. And then I rewrote the entire UI and then did a pull request into the main repo and Brandon brought it in, which is [inaudible] Matt: 20:37 CIS. I'm looking at it right now, the very end of it where he shows the screenshots and it's very James like, because now it has a gradient all about those gradients. That's right. So it's all in there. It's all pretty. And, and honestly if you're just going through it for the first time, you know, it'd take you 10, 20, 30 minutes to get set up and deploy to the back end is very seamless. You can do it all from visual studio or visual studio for Mac. The, the, the, the, the get hub page takes you through all of it, which is, which is great. Yeah, it's very, it's super thorough. And I like the, I like the screenshot so you know what you're up to and you don't get, you're not lost, you know, if you're going down the right trail or not. I agree. Matt: 21:18 And the other challenge that just wrapped up to talk about here is the carousel view challenge carousel view as a brand new feature of Xamarin forms. It's in a preview. I'd send a prereleased Xamarin forms four dot three under a feature flag. They've done this for a while. We just did a.net community stand up with a Javier from the team. And Paul who did the carousel view challenge and a ran for about two weeks and there was over 40 entries to it, which is cool. So this is brand new functionality, creating a brand new app, porting an app, designing an app. And the coolest thing about it cause carousel view is you can flip, I think of it as like flipping through cards. You see this thing all the time, even on websites, they're carousels that are flipping around. And the awesome part about these challenges when you're testing new features is that you get to give that the team product feedback. Matt: 22:17 So through all of this, there were some beautiful highlights and Steven [inaudible] did some great things through in Tran did some great pull requests. Paul liked a very beautiful user interface. Everything is open source. You can be like, Oh, I want to build an app like that. I'm just going to go pull that code so you can do that. And there's just some ridiculously beautiful applications and code. I'm going to steal for sure. And everyone on there and get stickers. I need to send them all out. I have stacks of things to send out next week which is really, really cool. And the team got a lot of feedback so they're going to be extending it a little bit more and adding little indicator icons as an option and working on some, some fixes that people found while they were using it. Matt: 23:01 So it's a, it's a really great blog posts it and also take a look at the GitHub repo. These challenges are a win win for everybody. When I host my office hours where here's a quick plug where anybody can come talk to me, schedule some time at AKA dot. Ms slash office dash hours. Several people have mentioned that they love these challenges because they can go in and just learn how other people have done things using this latest and greatest technology like visual or collection viewer care. So view and also gain a lot of inspiration from it too. Just seeing the UIs and like, Oh, I never know new, you can do something like this, which they are man forums and looking at this collection view or the carousel view wrap up post. You have to look at. Javier is his one, he has a Brazilian coffee and then hot chocolate and the like the hot chocolate mug with the marshmallows is rolling in from the side. It's, it's amazing. It's, it's beautiful. I would never even thought to do something like that and now I can, now I can go steal the code and make it look like it's my own. What more can you ask for? James: 24:10 I know, I know. And then he did come on to the [inaudible] community stand up and he walked through all sorts of, all sorts of things. Like I didn't know, I tried to use it in one of my streams and I'm like, I'm doing it wrong. And it's because I was doing it by trial and error. And then I took a look at the cares, I'll be challenged. I said, Oh, I was doing it wrong. Come on James and flip the flute. Feudal flags and boom, I was good to go. And thanks to Javier for coming onto that. That's a good one to watch too, so that's awesome. Matt: 24:38 Nice. Yeah. Last week's community challenge. Was that a lot of fun and I'm not just saying because I got to be lucky enough to be on it, but that's part of the reason why it was a lot of fun. No, no. So what else is new in the world of cloud? It's partly closed. It's all cloudy here today, but yesterday it was nice and a sun. So there's a brand new show out. James, I'm not sure if you know about this one. We're calling it the DevOps for mobile show. I think he might know a little bit about it. James: 25:11 Yeah, a long in the works. I would say we've started to roll out a brand new show part of on.net. It's kind of on the the.net channel. And it's called, yeah, dev ops or mobile. And I did it with my good friend, Abel Wang, who is an amazing individual and from our dev ops cloud advocate team. I think you saw on the cloud it give team for dev ops or did he, yeah, so he's still there. And him and I a, he's a dev ops like expert. He's a rock star. He's amazing. I know mobile. So I said, Hey, I'm going to show you what mobile is all about and what I think dev ops is and all the tools around it. Cause he's done a lot of web and Docker and services and also just have this conversation. So instead of me just coming on or someone else coming on and saying like, here's how you do stuff. James: 26:04 It's a conversation piece. So the first few episodes are out. We discussed what is dev ops, like how do you do source control and distribution. We're gonna talk about app signing. We're going to talk about testing, we're talking about distribution or we're talking about all the things analytic scratch, wearing, all the things that you could possibly want to know and doing what tools you can use today. And obviously since I'm a Zammarin developer, I show up at Xamarin apps, but of course you can use it with any application of your shelf app center. We shove up dev ops show, get hub. So all of the things, it's quite quite fun. So it kind of pairs really nice with those.net one Oh one videos that sort of this bigger, longer dev ops for mobile kind of, but even Matt: 26:44 Deeper I would say. Nice. Yeah. Dev ops is one of those things that I know just enough about to know that I really don't know enough about. And yeah, I'm really excited to see as more and more of those roll out and yeah, you couldn't have picked a better partner than able to Dico host those with you. So I'm excited to see the rest of those that say as they roll out and yeah, I think they will be, there's eight of them total and I believe they'll all be done by the end of October. So boom, boom, boom, boom. You'll be good to go. Nice. Nice. And so other cloud news I wanted to talk about is also on the on.net show is sessile talked about how to create custom bindings for Azure functions. So this kind of goes along with the Azure functions challenge that we just talked about. Matt: 27:30 And now if you wanted a, once you've learn all about Azure functions and you wanted to tick it up the next level. So what bindings are in functions is let's say that you're going to write to a cosmos DB or maybe write to a storage account. You don't actually have to new up the particular client to do that. You can just have them pass it in as a parameter to functions. So that's a binding. You can do more though. You can create your own custom binding to do essentially whatever you want. You wanted to call it the SQL server custom binding. You want to let's say hook into Azure dev ops somehow custom binding. And so this episode goes through how you would actually create the custom bindings to do that. And I'm super enlightening. Custom bindings I'm not going to say are easy. I hate when I say things are easy because there's always, when you're learning something, there's always hiccups, but they're not that bad to do once you know what you're, what, what, what you're up against. Matt: 28:30 So it's pretty cool. It definitely will put that show in the notes and check it out. It's, it's fun. Very cool. I love all the functions. I love the builtin bindings, but to kind of have a nice walk through of how to do custom ones. And these are things that pipe in and out. Super awesome. Super sweet. So I guess we are on to the Azure storage service of the month that I just gave it away. What it is is the Azure storage, but the Azure service, it's going to be Azure storage. I was racking my brain, you know, Azure has like 55 billion products in it. It's like, what do I want to talk about? And I thought, well let's talk about one of the basic building blocks of it all. And that's Azure storage and especially for a mobile developers is that a lot of times we're going to have to display maybe images and we're not going to want to have all those images on device. Matt: 29:22 So maybe we should put them up in blob storage. What does Bob Stanford binary large object I believe. Oh, is that what it is? I don't know. I just, I always thought it was just like a blob. The blob is calming. It's just blah. Yeah. So anyways, so that's what everybody really knows. Storage is about the blobs and it's what's cool about it is that you can store a massive amount of blobs up there for pretty cheap as well. You can also throw files up there so you can think of the a file storage and Azure storage. Something akin to actually lead the way you would do your files on your operating system. So like a cloud, a West file storage is an easy way to start thinking about it. Address storage also has table storage within it. So what you have, we organize it by table storage. Matt: 30:17 Think of it like a regular database table, but except you're organizing it, you have one and you're gonna organize that by a partition key than a row key. Then he can have a bunch of columns and enters also skews. So like you want to send messaging and so you get all of those features in just one single storage account. And for I like I said, mobile developers, maybe the blobs and QS are going to be the first things that we think of tables afterwards. But here's the cool thing is that it's super easy to pop a CDN around the address storage. So like around your blobs. That means anybody around the world is going to be able to download images super quick. Then so that's really cool. Only you have to do is actually go out and say, Hey, I want to CDM spins it up and there you go. Content delivery network for your images around the world. Everybody's happy because everything downloads super duper quickly. So there you go. Azure storage, the service of the month, James: 31:18 Service of the mind. Yeah. I would honestly say that the, I've been using storage but I didn't really notice that included so much other stuff inside of it because I've always used blobs just to do blobs in and out. And, well my, someone was asking me about tables and a guy, you know, they'll Cosmo's gonna use, use Cosmo's and table API's APIs. Here's table as a backend. There's documented B, there's all sorts of stuff. And they're like, well I want to use storage cause I already have a storage account. And storage is like crazy cheap. It's just like so cheap. It's the cheapest of the cheapest. It's really cheap. And they go, you know, my use case really is in general just for internal stuff. So I don't need all the power of, of cosmos. Like I like the idea of it, but I don't need all of it. James: 32:09 And like, Oh man, that's, that's a, that's a good point. I didn't really think about it like that. So what's cool is that while you search for documentation on table storage stuff, it's really gonna point you all to the cosmos. But when you go into your storage account, there's table API boom. There it is. It's like the same SDK. It's like the same exact API is everything and you just get to pick and it's like a one click in my migrate. So if you want to start with table API and then move to Cosmo's later on, you can easily do that. You can just kind of move stuff around because it can use the table API API, it's table storage API as it's sort of query language, which is amazing. That's a bunch of buzzwords to say that if you're looking for a super cheap table solution, boom, there it is. You'll be good to go. And that's all it works with Xamarin apps, which is really rad. Yeah. It's built in there. The STKs that they have for it Matt: 33:00 Just, just work. And it's yeah, super rad like you said. And it's, yeah, it's super duper cheap to run this. So it's, it's definitely worth knowing about if to keep as keeping your back pocket for when you need some, some storage James: 33:17 And who doesn't need storage? You've got to have all the storage all the time. Yep. Matt: 33:21 So, Oh well I guess that brings us to a everyone's favorite part of the podcast. Think of the pod, which you got man tick. Well going along with the Azure storage. The oldie but goodie. This thing has been around for probably ever, and it's called FF image loading. And I was refactoring an old demo app that we're, we're gonna be using on an upcoming tour. Speaker 5: 33:46 And Matt: 33:49 Aye. Things just weren't working perfect. So I downloaded the FF image loading, popped it in, and you just get like beautiful image loading. It does like cashing for you. Like when you're downloading image, it kind of slowly fades it in. It can do different transformations and whatnot. It's just as like all encompassing image library. Speaker 5: 34:09 And Matt: 34:11 Here's, here's the greatest thing I can ever say about a library. It just works. And so it's been out there for a long, long time. I'm not even sure that first state that they release it. I'll have to go on the get hub. But yeah, it's an oldie, but it's a goodie. People do ask about it every now and then and I love it. So check it out if you want to have some image handling and image loading in your apps so when they're nice, still working on it. 14 days ago was our last commits. So Speaker 5: 34:46 Good and good. Very cool. James: 34:49 So my pick is effect that I've had before, but there's an update to my pic. So pickup date of the week which is pancake view. I love pancake view. I've got to get my gradients all day. Am I rounded corners and all sorts of stuff. And Stevens [inaudible] I put a challenge out to him and I said, Hey, I've been working on my handsome informs app and I need some UWP goodness, make this happen in your pancake view. And that day he installed windows and visual studio 20, 19 and later that day you w pancake view happens. And so, so it's in the same package. Xamarin dot forms I pancake view, which is an amazing library to do, drop shadows, card views, rounded all sorts of good stuff gradients everywhere. So there's official UWP support in the box along with iOS and Android, but this version also adds on a new thing called gradient stop collections. James: 35:51 So you are able to previously just have a single start and stop gradient and it would blend between them, but now you can have start and stop gradient collections which is great because you might want to have different colors at zero in 20 and 40 and 60% all the way down that your designers may give you a, and now you can just add a gradient stop collection to your pancake view, which is super, super cool. So if you haven't been using this control, use it. I also then challenge Stephen to just do a pull request and his Xamarin forms and just make it happen. And he has a really great breakdown. I really like what he did on this platform support, and I needed to do this on mine, is he has a platform of support of every single property and where and how it is supported. James: 36:39 So most of the things are supported in UWP but not everything. And he'll outline that in there, which is pretty cool. So it's a great, great, great, great, great library that everybody needs in their life. So I have to admit, the pancake view is actually a pretty dangerous library to use because you'll spend so much time playing with the gradients to make your app look cool that you won't actually finish your app. Right? You'll just be stuck, you know, like, Oh this, this looks pretty neat. And actually that did happen to me. I was working on the the app for the.net con. I cloned your fourth year, you're pretty weather app. And I was just playing around on other screens like, Oh yeah, this, this looks nice. Oh, what happens if I tweaked this color? And there's a lot of websites out there that give you gradients. James: 37:22 Like, Oh, there's this, you know, a ton of different gradients that you can plug in and it's, you get lost playing with gradients. It's gradient, all the things, all the things it is, it's really, really good. So definitely give it a look and, and you can use it just as your background. I use it in one of my apps, like the weather app. It's just the background. You don't have to use the card view, you don't have to use the rounded corners. It could just be the background. You could wrap your grid or your scroll view in it and then boom, it'll just handle all of it for you. So it's, it's pretty up. Love it. Cool. Well James, we did it. We did it. Where are the October? October. Crushed it. We made it. How about that? Another great Xamarin podcast. Yeah, one day we'll get together in the same room. James: 38:12 Little. Do our listeners know that somehow we've done a great job of recording four episodes remote because even though we live not that far from each other and we work basically across the street from each other on campus in Redmond, we're never there at the same time. So. So we are recording on Zencaster thanks to our friends at Zencaster for making it possible to record this podcast on the road and auto mixing it for us. Ah, that's going to do it man. We did it. We're done. I guess we'll be back in November, right? Look for us the second Friday of November, but first the second Friday of October. That's right. Of course. Go to Xamarin podcast.com you can subscribe on your favorite podcast application or if you want it on your Alexa, go to your Alexa flash briefing and you can go to Xamarin podcast.com/alexa and that's how you can pipe into that briefing feed. So you will never ever miss an episode of the Xamarin podcast ever again. I was going to do for this week, Matt, I love you. Have a go. Alright. Talk to you later, James Speaker 2: 39:18 [Inaudible] Speaker 1: 39:26 [Inaudible] [inaudible].