This year, I had some rough time to keep me motivated on writing blog posts. In the early months, I was keeping my target to write about Xamarin Forms and my implementations, but I slowly lost pace around the summer.
Xamarin posts
Within the first half of the year, I was keeping a pretty constant 2 week frame for new blog posts, targeting Xamarin and Xamarin Forms. I touched several topics (some of which may be obsolete since Xamarin Forms 3.x). Here is a short recap:
- #XfQaD: Using ProgressRing for UWP and keep a single activity indicator API in Xamarin.Forms
- #XfQaD: read package identity and version from platform project with Xamarin.Forms
- #XfQaD: Limit maximum lines of Label and indicate text truncation
- Xamarin Android: asymmetric encryption without any user input or hardcoded values
- How to perform asymmetric encryption without user input/hardcoded values with Xamarin iOS
- Using the built-in UWP data protection for data encryption
- Xamarin.Forms, Akavache and I: Initial setup (new series)
- Xamarin.Forms, Akavache and I: storing, retrieving and deleting data
- Xamarin.Forms, Akavache and I: ensuring protection of sensitive data
- Xamarin Forms, the MVVMLight Toolkit and I: migrating the Forms project and MVVMLight to .NET Standard
- Xamarin Forms, the MVVMLight Toolkit and I: Command Chaining
- A faster way to add image assets to your Xamarin.iOS project in Visual Studio 2017
The rise of crypto and blockchain
Since 2017, I was loosely following the area of crypto currencies and blockchain. This year, however, marks the beginning of a deeper dive into the blockchain area – and of course also into crypto currencies. I am not advising anyone to invest any money into crypto currencies, but there are certain projects out there that are really interesting. Two of them are social networks, similar to Tumblr: Steemit and Trybe. While Steemit is running on its own blockchain, Trybe is utilizing the EOS blockchain. Sadly, the .NET world seems to be widely ignored, so I stepped down a bit from posting on those two. I also tested several other networks running on or with blockchain, but none of them took me like the two mentioned above. If you want to learn more about the crypto currencies/projects I am interested in, just head over to my crypto page.
Open Source
Even if I did not made a lot of sound around it, I have worked on some libraries this year. I am not going into detail on every one, just head over to my Github:
I am currently working on another library (targetting crypto payments) – I will write about it once it is ready to be used in your projects.
RIP UniShare
One of the sadest moments this year was the death of UniShare, my most popular Windows (Phone) app. Long story short, due to some changes Facebook made to their API, I had to take UniShare to its funeral at the end of October. Read more about it here.
Looking forward to 2019
In 2019, I will continue my journey within the crypto/blockchain world. Like I wrote above, I am working on a crypto related project at the moment, which I hope to have ready in the early weeks of 2019. One of my other projects, WindowsUnited, will be taken over by another developer in 2019 (because he can invest more time into their official apps and work form them more ore less exclusively). This will free up some recsources, which I am trying to invest in my other projects and the rise of my blogging pace (again).
Thanks to all of you for reading my posts this year. I hope you’ll be with me in 2019 as well. I wish all of you a good arrival in 2019 and a happy new year once it arrives.
![Saying Goodbye to 2017 [Editorial]](https://msicc.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/goodbye2017.jpg)
