Well, at least Xamarin.Forms developers can now stop paying lip service to the Windows component of their cross-platform mobile apps.
The days of pretending the mobile space was a topped by a triad are over, with a top Microsoft exec admitting in a tweet Sunday that the company isn't focusing on introducing new features or hardware for the Windows 10 Mobile project -- which followed the Windows Phone project. In other words, as we all knew, that mobile space is dominated by a duo: Apple iOS and Google Android.
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Posted by David Ramel on October 9, 20170 comments
Hell has long since frozen over for Microsoft haters of yore, but one more nail in their coffin is this week's news that the company has joined the Open Source Initiative (OSI).
The move is yet another milestone in the company's years-long transformation into a more open organization, a far cry from how it used to be perceived -- especially by developers.
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Posted by David Ramel on September 28, 20170 comments
What's the best job in the world if you're an analytical software developer with a nose for statistics and a desire to work with cutting-edge technologies -- and a sports nut to boot?
You might start with being director of data science at STATS LLC, a prominent sports analytics company that counts some of the most popular sports teams and biggest media companies in the world among its customers.
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Posted by David Ramel on July 18, 20170 comments
One thing I've learned in fooling around with React Native is that its young ecosystem is all over the map, making it hard to keep track of all the moving parts.
The open source, Facebook-originated React Native framework for building iOS and Android apps with JavaScript is a hot topic in the mobile dev industry, getting more traction all the time for its game-changing possibilities.
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Posted by David Ramel on July 13, 20170 comments
By now you've surely heard about the junior software developer who destroyed a production database on his first day on the job, was immediately fired and even warned about possible legal action.
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Posted by David Ramel on June 19, 20170 comments
Sure you know all about the Stack Overflow Q&A site for programmers -- chock full of technical advice -- but it has all kinds of picky restrictions.
Like, questions are routinely shut down at SO for being too broad, off topic and -- worst of all -- "primarily opinion-based."
What's the fun in that?
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Posted by David Ramel on June 16, 20170 comments
Kotlin is all the rage now that it has been deemed a first-class programming language for developing Android apps.
Actually, it's been raging all on its own for a while now, as evidenced by the Stack Overflow Trends chart below. That empirical evidence is substantiated by my own subjective experience -- in other words, Kotlin has been increasingly prominent in my daily deluge of news releases and e-mails from PR types.
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Posted by David Ramel on June 1, 20170 comments
Visual Studio Code is a great, free, cross-platform, open source code editor with an extensive library of prebuilt extensions for all kinds of useful, add-on functionality.
Sometimes, however, you don't need all of the functionality provided by, say, the popular Python extension (more than 2.2 million installs) that provides rich support such as linting, IntelliSense, code formatting and so on. Sometimes you just want to quickly insert smaller code blocks that perform useful -- and repeatable -- tasks, such as loops or conditional statements.
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Posted by David Ramel on May 25, 20170 comments
It's no secret that enterprise mobile and Web app development is being transformed by a new class of tools enabling non-programming "citizen developers" to meet the insatiable demand for apps amid a shortage of coding pros.
These tools have many names -- such as rapid-application development (RAD), low-code and even no-code -- but they typically feature functionality such as model-driven development, point-and-click programming, drag-and-drop composability, wizard-based workflows and similar techniques.
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Posted by David Ramel on May 19, 20170 comments
Testing mobile apps can be a pain, especially with the wide range of OS versions in the Android ecosystem and myriad devices with different screen sizes, resolutions, capabilities and so on -- while iOS developers, of course, enjoy a far narrower scope of testing requirements.
Although device emulators are available for single-device manual testing, such as the Android Virtual Device (AVD) built into Android Studio, and the popular third-party option for Android, GenyMotion, they don't allow for automated testing on a variety of real devices.
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Posted by David Ramel on May 5, 20170 comments