Akka.NET is a great toolkit for building concurrent and fault-tolerant systems by way of the actor model. Most think of actor systems as something you would just do on the server side of things, as part of building large distributed systems, but the approach works great for all sorts of applications. The recent release of Akka.NET 1.3 brought with it support for .NET Standard 1.6, so naturally I needed to try using…

It's been a few years now since Xamarin.Forms was released into the world, and it continues to be a popular and evolving framework choice for Xamarin developers. Later this year Microsoft is planning to release Xamarin.Forms 3.0, its third major release of the framework, which is slated to ship with a lot of exciting features and improvements. While it certainly won't be comprehensive, as the feature set is large and still in motion,…

Last week I had the pleasure of chatting with Jesse Liberty on Yet Another Podcast about a variety of topics, ranging from Azure Functions, Alexa skills, Azure Mobile Center, F#, and more. Check it out here: Yet Another Podcast – #168: Greg Shackles Enjoy!…

A couple years back I wrote an article covering how you could leverage many different languages in your Xamarin apps. In it, I included an F# portable class library that was referenced by the main application written in C#. That's still a completely valid approach, but I thought it was a good time to follow that up with a look at how, these days, you can use F# to build the entire app, and why it's…

There are a lot of ways to approach building APIs for your apps, and no shortage of arguments that ensue whenever discussing them. One of the more standard approaches is to go with a RESTful design (cue the obligatory argument on what this actually means...), which has its advantages but can also lead to needing to make several requests to get the data you want, and can sometimes have a negative impact on mobile performance. Similarly,…