Episode 108: Buddy App

00:00:10 Matt Welcome, everyone to the.net Maui podcast. We're here to keep you up to date with the latest and greatest and. 00:00:16 Matt in 00:00:22 Matt Net client development. We'll talk about some Azure, some visual studios, some blazer and ofcourse.net Maui. I'm Matt Soucoup and today we're talking about. 00:00:31 Matt An app called the construction industry help. 00:00:35 Matt Right, and I'm joined by Shri Ram, Akella, Bill Hill and Jan Llamas and Ben Budig. 00:00:42 Matt So Bill, I'm going to. 00:00:43 Matt Kick it over to. 00:00:44 Matt You right away if you can explain a little bit about what the app is and the motivation behind it. 00:00:50 Bill Yeah, OK, thank you. 00:00:52 Bill Well that the app was really conceived as a consequence of the major problem we've got within construction, not just construction in the UK, but construction worldwide. 00:01:03 Bill It's probably a little known fact, but construction worldwide has got the worst record of suicides on any other end. 00:01:12 Bill History we concentrate on the UK and Ireland and in the UK and Ireland. We're losing two construction workers every working day to suicide. Almost 20% of productivity is lost every year as a consequence of stress, anxiety or depression. 00:01:32 Bill The industry has probably populated by 87% male population within the industry and unfortunately men have some very male stoic beliefs about their mental well. 00:01:45 Bill Being so in the past we had created a telephone line, a construction industry telephone line, which is a 24/7 helpline to help people with any well being problems. 00:01:57 Bill Any physical problems? 00:01:59 Bill Any financial problems which has been pretty well utilized but we recognized the need that for those people. 00:02:05 Bill That didn't have the bravery or the courage to make that phone call. 00:02:09 Bill We needed some. 00:02:10 Bill Thing for them to to learn and to be able to interrogate about how they were feeling so that they can actually get some responses to that. 00:02:20 Bill Learn about the issues, maybe get some coping strategies about the issues like stress or anxiety or depression. 00:02:29 Bill Some coping strategies. 00:02:30 Bill And even maybe do some testing on how stressed they were and ultimately to be able to signpost them to get the extra help and support. 00:02:40 Bill We needed so so we went out to the market and said and we. 00:02:43 Bill Talked to a major. 00:02:45 Bill Worldwide software provider and unfortunately their software was too heavyweight and for the application they were very willing to want to help but disturb the software was too heavy and luckily. 00:03:00 Bill We found coins who are a specialist niche player in the construction industry who do construction industry software. 00:03:07 Bill So who better to go to than somebody who already knows the construction workplace? 00:03:12 Bill And we connected with coins and through coins and working with the Microsoft Technology suite behind that. 00:03:20 Bill The construction industry helpline app was built and the industry has absolutely taken it to heart. 00:03:27 Bill And it's a fantastic tool that supports everything we do in this space. 00:03:32 Bill To help the workforce, it's absolutely brilliant. 00:03:36 Matt So yeah, and then your company coins does support the construction industry overall with app apps, but this construction industry helpline app, which is an incredibly important app, maybe the most important app that your company is built, so give me a little bit in our listeners. 00:03:53 Matt A little bit of background on. 00:03:56 Matt Your perspective on building the app. 00:03:59 Yan Yeah, thank you. 00:04:00 Yan Thank you so. 00:04:01 Yan So like Bill said, we were in shock. 00:04:04 Yan I was personally in shock too. 00:04:06 Yan When when we learn about these statistics in the construction industry, when it comes to suicide, depression, stress and the loss of productivity and we wanted to help. 00:04:16 Yan Luckily for us, we selected Microsoft as a partner many years ago and one of the reasons we selected Microsoft as a partner is because our technology tool set is has a wide range of solutions including mobile and and through the acquisition Microsoft made on Xamarin a few years ago. 00:04:36 Yan We now have the tools to develop mobile experiences that are cohesive, consistent and rich across multiple platforms and devices. 00:04:47 Yan We actually have a long history of developing natively on iOS that we're developing natively in Android, you know, and actually the the All Windows Mobile. 00:04:56 Yan But with Xamarin, we now have an opportunity to deliver the same experience to multiple platforms very effectively and we started on Xamarin native a while back, but we wanted to do more, which is how can we actually deliver more value to our clients? 00:05:17 Yan And actually build being a client quote UN quote, how can we do more for them using less resources in time? And that's where we actually move from. 00:05:28 Yan We're in native to now. 00:05:30 Yan Xamarin forms to deliver this application and we are hopeful that with this tools we will be able to do more. 00:05:41 Yan For our clients like I. 00:05:42 Yan Said, but also develop even richer experiences. 00:05:46 Yan Some of the some of the. 00:05:48 Yan Tools that are in some informs. 00:05:49 Yan And and and. 00:05:50 Yan And that were coming on to Xamarin native will be invaluable for our developers and and for our designers or UX designers to deliver even richer experience than what we could do before. 00:06:01 Yan Because there's you know, there were times in the past where we develop some beautiful components or design some beautiful components that were really hard to implement by the mobile team. 00:06:10 Yan And with Xamarin forms. 00:06:12 Yan And down in the future with them. 00:06:14 Yan With Maui, we're we're we're hoping that we can actually deliver, deliver some incredibly exciting experiences to our users with less effort that being what's required to develop a native app and and and, like, like Bill said, you know, we we're very pleased that through our. 00:06:32 Yan Partnership with Microsoft. 00:06:33 Yan We will we have the tools and development resources to be able to deliver this application to him. 00:06:40 Yan But yeah, we're really excited to work with Microsoft and with Bill. 00:06:47 Matt So Sriram you you helped develop the application and then it was initially Xamarin native and we moved over to Xamarin forms eventually so can you tell us a little bit about that journey and I guess First off start off with what you thought about developing in Xamarin native and then the migration process and then now how you feel about salmon. 00:07:08 Sreeram Yeah, so initially when we all thought of this, I believe this app. 00:07:13 Sreeram Obviously we don't have. 00:07:15 Sreeram In-house general experience as the first challenge we. 00:07:17 Ben Have to face. 00:07:18 Sreeram And then we. 00:07:19 Sreeram Have native developers who are their experience on iOS? 00:07:23 Sreeram Or on on Android. 00:07:26 Sreeram So what we thought was we'll try to utilize these under native platform because we already have. 00:07:32 Sreeram You know, in our experience of violence and Nate and Android, so we can leverage them on the UI side and so we can bring a C sharp developer to develop the whole app. 00:07:44 Sreeram It went fairly. 00:07:45 Sreeram Smooth, I would say initially the Platform Developers forum agreement tend to jump on because I'm really native platform because in in in they didn't see that as a natural transition for them. 00:07:58 Sreeram But eventually it went on fine and finally we built the Xamarin native. 00:08:04 Sreeram So then we thought, like why do we want to? 00:08:07 Sreeram Keep it native for any maintenance. 00:08:09 Sreeram Activities we have to change it twice. 00:08:11 Sreeram Sometimes sometimes we find issues that are not straightforward to fix, and maintenance is becoming challenging because we need to find someone. 00:08:24 Sreeram Who understand iOS and Android to great extent? 00:08:26 Matt OK, next. 00:08:27 Sreeram Depending on how complex the problem is, and that's when we thought like, yeah, let's transition everything into forms. 00:08:34 Sreeram Now the forms is more stable. 00:08:36 Sreeram That's when we got in a, uh, XAML or Xamarin forms expert, and we initially have two choices, either to transition screen by screen or. 00:08:48 Sreeram Start as a fresh app and migrate. 00:08:50 Sreeram All the functionality from the native app. 00:08:52 Sreeram Into the Xamarin forms. 00:08:54 Sreeram So we decided to go the 2nd way. 00:08:58 Sreeram We started with a fresh app. 00:09:01 Sreeram We brought in some of the leading platform plugins like Prism, Xamarin, Community. 00:09:09 Sreeram Yeah, and we. 00:09:10 Sreeram Created the frame first. 00:09:13 Sreeram With all the. 00:09:15 Sreeram Uh, basic navigation parts and everything. 00:09:18 Sreeram Laid out and the. 00:09:20 Sreeram Xamarin forms expert, then created the basic pages to prove that you know the the forms will be as. 00:09:28 Sreeram Performant as needed. 00:09:30 Sreeram So that one phenomenally well, I would say and immediately we ask this underinformed. 00:09:34 Sreeram Is for to. 00:09:36 Sreeram Create take the most complex screen. 00:09:39 Sreeram From the app and convert that. 00:09:40 Sreeram Into forms. 00:09:42 Sreeram And once that is done, everything else is simple. 00:09:45 Sreeram Breeze, because we have samples to look. 00:09:47 Sreeram At and the. 00:09:48 Sreeram Developers were very. 00:09:49 Sreeram Quick to adapt to the new technology. 00:09:52 Sreeram And everything was so smooth and it. 00:09:55 Sreeram Was exactly same. 00:09:56 Sreeram Well we got exactly same. 00:09:58 Sreeram Performance as the. 00:10:00 Sreeram Xamarin native map? 00:10:02 Ben So Sriram I've I was just wondering do you have did you find a need to create custom renderers to implement any of the platform specific functionality in the app? 00:10:13 Sreeram Uh, we had such requirements, for example. 00:10:18 Sreeram We have to remove the. 00:10:20 Sreeram Border for a text. 00:10:22 Sreeram View and then. 00:10:24 Sreeram We looked into German community toolkit thanks to Sam and community. 00:10:28 Sreeram OK, it gave lot of functionality in building anyways so we never had to build any custom renderers, ever. 00:10:35 Sreeram We we we? 00:10:37 Sreeram We maintained the whole UI purely in XAML and Xamarin forms. 00:10:43 Sreeram That's excellent. 00:10:44 Matt And a big shout out to the Community toolkit authors. It is the community putting that together and they are building the.net Maui Community Toolkit right now. So that's actually really nice that the community is helping out to build these apps. 00:10:59 Matt Essentially donating their time to help everybody out, and it's the third party stuff coming together and, well, helping helping build the apps itself. 00:11:08 Matt And so it's really cool that you didn't have to Shri Ram Ram. 00:11:11 Matt Go through the whole custom renderer route. 00:11:15 Matt So yeah, and I wanted to ask you, we talked a little bit about before about this, but.net Maui. 00:11:20 Matt Uhm, is the plans to move to Maui anytime soon. 00:11:24 Yan Well, I I think from a high level. 00:11:26 Yan You know from a. 00:11:26 Yan Business perspective, you know we like to upgrade once everything gets really super stable, right? 00:11:36 Yan So we probably won't be upgrading. 00:11:39 Yan Bang on the release date and when you know the first release, we will probably wait to the second release where the community helps iron out any problematic issues or bugs or anything like that. 00:11:52 Yan Or, you know, there may be some some more improvements coming in, so we probably want to upgrade when when it's released. 00:11:59 Yan But we we will probably upgrade for version two. 00:12:02 Yan Let's say of that. 00:12:04 Yan Release, I'm actually one of the biggest proponents you know of. 00:12:08 Yan Upgrading to Maui as soon as possible. 00:12:10 Yan There's a lot of things that I that I've seen in Maui that I love. 00:12:13 Yan Starting with a name and you know, and I would love to get a mailing T shirt. 00:12:17 Yan By the way, just doesn't just say and and but you know the tech team there there are. 00:12:24 Yan You know, smarter than me and therefore they all agreed that we the. 00:12:29 Yan Moving on version 2 might be a much better plan, but business executives that are also smarter than me agree as well with that. 00:12:36 Yan So, so whilst I would love to upgrade as soon as possible that the company has agreed that version two will be the the the best way forward. 00:12:45 Yan And I get this challenge for the community. 00:12:47 Yan Thank you communities. 00:12:48 Yan Every community. 00:12:48 Yan 'cause now you're actually helping people in the construction industry indirectly. 00:12:53 Yan But it it's a really a worldwide effort that you put in for everybody and now actually helping the construction industry. 00:13:01 Yan Thank you. 00:13:01 Ben So going back to the existing forms application, one of the things I was wondering is. 00:13:08 Ben Do you have to? 00:13:10 Ben Be mindful of privacy and and presumably you do so. 00:13:15 Ben Does that prohibit you being able to do things like collecting analytics of any kind? 00:13:21 Sreeram So from day one we were very mindful about. 00:13:24 Sreeram Privacy and so we never collected anything user specific. 00:13:30 Sreeram So all the information that we collected is an aggregate information on how many page hits we are getting, how many transition that a user is doing, but nothing specific to our user or no information that ties down to a specific mobile. 00:13:48 Bill Yeah, maybe maybe I can, but in there as well, is that? 00:13:51 Bill From a perspective of the industry as well, it was really important to us that we we protected the owner. 00:13:59 Bill Embassy of the individual using this app as well because there's a lot of fear that that kind of information would get into the hands of maybe employers, and then it would maybe prejudice them going forward for other project work on different construction sites. 00:14:17 Bill So it was really important to us. 00:14:19 Bill That we can see with every confidence that this was a highly confidential app that we were not collecting individuals data. 00:14:29 Bill But what we do want to know at some point is what routes people are taking through the app so that we can highlight maybe areas where we need to concentrate on and add more information and feed that back to the industry and give them some learning points to to maybe put educational programs in in in other areas, but right? 00:14:49 Bill From the onset it was was our requirement that we kept kept down enimity of the user. 00:15:00 Bill No they do not. 00:15:02 Yan Sorry too, I want I want to add actually that while it's for this application, definitely personally personal. 00:15:09 Yan Personally identifiable information is something we do not want to collect. 00:15:13 Yan We do want do we actually do capture some statistics about who was Twitch page and where and so forth? 00:15:20 Yan We are actually using Xamarin. 00:15:23 Yan On our own applications, industry specific applications that help construction teams around the world build things better and faster. 00:15:32 Yan And and for those sort of applications which are now in Xamarin native and we will be moving into Xamarin forms in the future. 00:15:41 Yan Collection it's very important, so we will be collecting all sorts of information. 00:15:47 Yan Obviously within the rule of law about the user, the you know, the everything, the feedback from the user on real time. 00:15:54 Yan Actually Shri Ram has a a project right now to be able to provide instant feedback and continuous feedback. 00:16:01 Yan About the usage of the application back to us to provide information about the usage of the application back to the companies so they can understand. 00:16:04 Speaker 1 OK. 00:16:10 Yan And what they're doing? 00:16:11 Yan How to do it better? 00:16:13 Yan So data collection when we move to those applications. 00:16:16 Yan Industry applications will be very important for us and we liked. 00:16:21 Yan The the the the. 00:16:23 Yan Tools and the the capabilities that German and other plugins have. 00:16:30 Yan In order to. 00:16:31 Yan Allow us to do that and we've been working with Microsoft. 00:16:35 Yan Close the end that. 00:16:37 Matt Bill kind of jumping back just to step in. 00:16:40 Matt And yeah, you might want to chime in on this one, too. 00:16:42 Matt Is you're absolutely right that there is kind of like a. 00:16:46 Matt Like a stigma like the the tough guy stigma and I think this spans more than just the construction industry. 00:16:52 Matt This is fans all over in every industry of men. 00:16:56 Matt Not wanting to admit they have issues and problems. 00:17:01 Matt And how did you? 00:17:02 Matt How do you go about letting? 00:17:03 Matt People know that the app even exists that the. 00:17:07 Matt Construction industry helpline is out there so I guess how did you do your initial? 00:17:12 Matt Roll out of. 00:17:16 Bill Yeah, so so again we we are. Obviously our charity is 100% dedicated to the construction industry in the UK and Ireland, so we get some pretty key contacts with all the major players all the Tier 1 constructors and and secondary tier and tertiary tier. A lot of the trade bodies. 00:17:35 Bill That, uh. 00:17:37 Bill Cool cool membership. 00:17:38 Bill Things like the plumbers, the electricians, the carpenters etc and they surveyors and even the professional classes. 00:17:45 Bill So we've got all these these contacts in place so when the the application was ready to launch then we we did this through. 00:17:53 Bill There's a week we dedicated the UK to mental health. 00:17:56 Bill Awareness Week and every year we have a release of the app during that week and we make a big hullabaloo about what the new features and benefits are in the app so that that's how we get to the market. 00:18:09 Bill But we also have a whole series of toolbox. 00:18:13 Bill Box just to the point that you've made there because one is there, but it's all right very well. 00:18:18 Bill Giving these tools out. 00:18:19 Bill But if if people have not used them because of the stigma attached to to, to be able to to access them, and the toolbox talks that we work with the industry are all about getting people together in a private situation and talking about. 00:18:34 Bill Other things apart from sport and football and cars and talking about you know the well being etc. 00:18:39 Bill And and when you give people the permission to talk about these subjects then it's actually get some talking. 00:18:45 Bill Quite a lot about it and then we introduce the app saying like Gary if you're in. 00:18:49 Bill Double, I mean our mission as a charity is that no construction worker or their family should be alone in a crisis. 00:18:56 Bill So we're trying to put in place a surround sound of of of charitable services around that individual, so that they've got every single route to get to help and support the 24/7 helpline they app. 00:19:09 Bill The training courses we run. 00:19:11 Bill We got beacons out there and we've got mental health first aid as on site. 00:19:15 Bill We're trying to put every single thing around the individual, but the biggest thing we've now got to overcome is stigma, because that is the thing we've got to break down and it's predominant in the male psyche. 00:19:26 Bill Is that stigma, and we've got some ways to go on that I can. 00:19:30 Yan Yeah no and and and and yeah I want to say you know that area like you said. 00:19:34 Yan New men we're. 00:19:36 Yan Perfect so we have, you know, difficulty accepting that we. 00:19:41 Yan Have issues right? 00:19:42 Yan So all also they tell me, you know, I have two daughters so and and my wife, so they always tell me that we men. 00:19:50 Yan We think we're perfect, so so it is very hard to do that, and also as a company we try to also contribute. 00:19:56 Yan We have customers. 00:19:58 Yan All over the. 00:19:59 Yan World and we are very proud of this application. 00:20:02 Yan So whenever there's a sales engagement or or there's an engagement with our clients, we always try to promote this with our customers and our prospects. 00:20:13 Yan And it has been incredibly well received. 00:20:15 Yan So so. 00:20:17 Yan There is a recognition within the industry that there is a problem and and that things need to get better and we're we're very happy that our customers have embraced this on this application and the work of the construction industry helpline and the lighthouse charity fully so so we we try to do. 00:20:38 Yan What we can to promote the application as well, but the brunt of the work in marketing campaigns and everything is really done by Bill and his team in the Lighthouse club, which do tremendous work around the UK to to help with this issue. 00:20:53 Yan These issues. 00:20:55 Matt It's amazingly important work as well, so switching gears just a little bit. 00:21:01 Matt Shri ram. 00:21:01 Matt One of the things. 00:21:02 Matt Things that our listeners are always interested in is the problems that you have when creating the app. 00:21:10 Matt So everybody, it's easy to talk about the good things, but what are the some of the issues that you ran into while creating the app? 00:21:16 Matt And then how did you overcome it? 00:21:18 Matt Now, maybe even just overall in your Xamarin development career, so now. 00:21:22 Matt Maybe not just this app. 00:21:23 Matt But overall, So what did you? 00:21:25 Matt What do you run into and how do you? 00:21:27 Matt How do you overcome it? 00:21:29 Sreeram Yeah, this is something I always think about because most of the times I run into problems I solve them and I'll I'll not. 00:21:36 Sreeram Share it anywhere. 00:21:37 Sreeram So probably this is the right form for. 00:21:39 Sreeram Problem for me to do that. 00:21:41 Sreeram Again, like Xamarin forms I, I basically came from WPF background, so I'm more into XAML and I love XAML as a technology. 00:21:53 Sreeram I've faced many problems, but the good thing with the sign in forms is every time I face a. 00:21:58 Sreeram Problem there is a work around for it. 00:22:01 Sreeram There are alignment issues. 00:22:03 Sreeram There are cloud collection view doesn't work the way I wanted. 00:22:07 Sreeram For example, yesterday I bumped into our collection view issue where the header template is not properly switching the way. 00:22:14 Sreeram I expect it to be it's. 00:22:16 Sreeram A bit more annoying because it was working fine on iOS. 00:22:20 Sreeram But on Android it doesn't work. 00:22:22 Sreeram It doesn't switch the way I. 00:22:24 Sreeram Expect it to. 00:22:25 Sreeram But the good thing is. 00:22:28 Sreeram We have tons of work arounds. 00:22:30 Sreeram For every sort. 00:22:31 Sreeram Of a problem. 00:22:32 Sreeram Uh, if I go back to the same color I just told you, I then immediately created a templated view which can move the template like what I wanted. 00:22:43 Sreeram So for all those problems like the alignment issues that I talked about, or or, uh? 00:22:52 Sreeram The view not being refresh. 00:22:56 Sreeram The way the way I wanted to talk about. 00:22:59 Sreeram There are work. 00:23:00 Sreeram Arounds and it is easy as well. 00:23:03 Sreeram Because the community so are at. 00:23:05 Sreeram The moment I put in a question, I normally get an answer pretty quickly. 00:23:10 Sreeram Sometimes I probably there will not be a similar problem faced by other developers. 00:23:15 Sreeram Because I'll be. 00:23:16 Sreeram Using more advanced features of silent forms, but. 00:23:21 Sreeram Again, the code is. 00:23:22 Sreeram Open source I can look into the code. 00:23:25 Sreeram And say, oh here is a problem to solve this problem. 00:23:28 Sreeram Here is a working. 00:23:29 Sreeram So it's easy. 00:23:31 Sreeram For me, because of the open source. 00:23:33 Sreeram Nature of the framework. 00:23:34 Yan And guys I I don't know. 00:23:35 Yan I'm not an expert, you know lecturer or or any of you guys here. 00:23:40 Yan But let's talk about hot reload I. 00:23:43 Yan I mean, I just love hot reload. 00:23:45 Yan You know I, I think it's the best thing since sliced bread. 00:23:49 Yan So as far as the company, we think that the whole reload function can really increase developer productivity. 00:23:56 Yan Designer productivity. 00:23:57 Yan UX designer product. 00:23:58 Yan Activity and help us get those products faster to our clients. 00:24:01 Yan I don't know for him if you want to talk about hot, reload. 00:24:04 Yan 'cause yeah. 00:24:05 Sreeram I yeah I both appreciate and I. 00:24:08 Sreeram Sometimes don't care about it. 00:24:10 Sreeram Because basically again I came from WPF background so. 00:24:14 Sreeram Uh, seeing the view. 00:24:17 Sreeram While we design it is this kind of? 00:24:19 Sreeram Uh, a given feature from yeah. 00:24:21 Sreeram It's like that is what? 00:24:22 Sreeram I expect from day one, but that's not being Xamarin native, and that's very problematic initially. 00:24:29 Sreeram And then when I moved to Xamarin forms, I found this hot reload and it's like how. 00:24:34 Sreeram Thank God I'm. 00:24:35 Sreeram Back to my. 00:24:37 Sreeram Usual stuff, now I can she. 00:24:39 Sreeram Make changes and it immediately. 00:24:41 Sreeram Reflects, so that's that's all. 00:24:44 Sreeram Very good when we are developing small to medium scale applications but but. 00:24:49 Sreeram Game we used to face problems with the hot reload when we have a a big application with many frameworks inside it. 00:24:58 Sreeram Again, for example, I use present forms, present forms in in the couple of earlier versions, the hot reload used to stop working again because I have. 00:25:10 Sreeram The the code. 00:25:12 Sreeram Open source I can. 00:25:13 Sreeram Looking at the code and see what's failing. 00:25:16 Sreeram And I can find. 00:25:16 Sreeram A work around. 00:25:18 Sreeram And again, in Xamarin forms case in prison forms case, I found a work around and. 00:25:23 Sreeram It started me make me to work. 00:25:25 Sreeram So yeah, definitely hot reload makes life. 00:25:28 Sreeram A lot easier. 00:25:30 Sreeram And and that's when he came to know about the C sharp hot reload. 00:25:35 Sreeram That's even better it again, going back to the WPA firmware editing and continues a real deal, and I used to really, really enjoy that. 00:25:48 Sreeram When I when I. 00:25:49 Sreeram Keep developing things I want to make small change. 00:25:52 Sreeram Why do I have to rebuild the whole world? 00:25:55 Sreeram Do not I just make a small change? 00:25:59 Sreeram Edit and then continue the same feature. 00:26:03 Sreeram Now I'm getting in. 00:26:03 Sreeram Talent forms well, it's really brilliant I. 00:26:07 Sreeram Would say it makes my life so easy. 00:26:09 Sreeram Above all I can enjoy making apps. 00:26:14 Matt Cool and I totally agree that hot reload is a game changer, especially. 00:26:19 Matt I liked it when it was XAML and now that it's C sharp, wonderful, and. 00:26:23 Matt And it's. 00:26:24 Matt It does, it makes enjoy. 00:26:25 Matt Developing enjoyable that you don't have to go through the whole rebuild cycle. 00:26:30 Matt It helps what we've we've been calling the inner dev loop. 00:26:34 Matt Just shorten that down. 00:26:36 Matt And when you can have it so much shorter, it just keeps you in the flow easier and we could just see those changes. 00:26:43 Matt Happen on the screen so much faster. 00:26:45 Matt That's it's amazing. 00:26:47 Matt I love it so much. 00:26:48 Matt So Ben, I wanted to throw this over to you because you get to deal with customers all over the place. 00:26:54 Matt So what are some issues you run into that are with Xamarin that you like? 00:26:59 Matt That either you get the work around all the time, or maybe that you are able to just see other people running into and like there there's a fix for this and you just need to show on the fix that or maybe a little bit less knowing. 00:27:12 Ben Yeah, so I could, uh, I'm trying to think of examples. 00:27:17 Ben I can repeat that there are many that come to mind, but I don't want to call out. 00:27:24 Ben Any particular offenders that that might? 00:27:29 Ben Offensive open source developers, but one of the things I do see is. 00:27:34 Ben Developers relying a little bit too heavily on existing frameworks, so there's so many different frameworks open source frameworks available, which is great. 00:27:44 Ben But I have seen many occasions where they get leaned on a. 00:27:50 Ben Bit too heavily. 00:27:51 Ben And they may actually pull in multiple conflicting frameworks just to get a little bit of extra functionality that they didn't realize they could actually do out of the box. 00:28:02 Ben And that's often a case of of legacy code of the evolution of of the forms framework from. 00:28:11 Ben Back in the day where there wasn't a huge amount, you got out of the box and so now when you revisit, do a code review on our customers. 00:28:20 Ben An enterprise that which has been existed for several years. 00:28:24 Ben You'll see there's a huge amount which. 00:28:27 Ben They would have got for free in Xamarin forms today if they'd ring it as of today. 00:28:31 Ben So yeah, that's often the case really with legacy code, but it's it's all good, keeps me, keeps me busy. 00:28:39 Sreeram Yeah, couple of extra. 00:28:42 Sreeram Things that I came out. 00:28:43 Sreeram How troubles with Xamarin forms? 00:28:45 Sreeram There are certain properties on controls. 00:28:49 Sreeram But don't mean anything like there is a background and there's a background color and the alignments, and we can have a. 00:28:57 Sreeram Start or the start with expand. 00:28:59 Sreeram Uh and and with expand. 00:29:02 Sreeram And those sort of edge. 00:29:03 Sreeram Cases right when someone is coming new? 00:29:06 Sreeram To this platform. 00:29:07 Sreeram This trouble, why is this not working? 00:29:08 Sreeram Need to send. 00:29:11 Sreeram Why is that not working? 00:29:12 Sreeram That kind of frustrates the on in the new own borders, I would say, but at the same time, if someone is really into London, France for a few months for. 00:29:21 Sreeram A year or something? 00:29:22 Sreeram Like that? 00:29:23 Sreeram They can really see OK. 00:29:24 Sreeram This is not there, that is not there so. 00:29:28 Sreeram We can easily find ways. 00:29:29 It up there. 00:29:32 Yan And actually, I I want to talk a bit about actually how Microsoft help us with this transition, right? 00:29:37 Yan 'cause they you know with any framework, there's always going to be issues and there's things that. 00:29:42 Yan Microsoft will know that when we were new into a framework like this like this, we we we would have to find that ourselves. 00:29:49 Yan So Microsoft actually helped us in a very exciting way. 00:29:52 Yan We called it Project Ninja so they airdropped up and and and other developers, you know. 00:29:59 Yan We called them specialist Sam. 00:30:00 Yan Tries to working side by side with Sriram and his team to build a proof of concept that helped to see this savings and the development flow to convert from Xamarin. 00:30:18 Yan Native to Xamarin forms and that helped convince the executives at the company. 00:30:23 Yan You can imagine we invested a lot of time and money building all these applications in native and why it was worthwhile to make that move. 00:30:33 Yan And it helped. 00:30:34 Yan I think our development team. 00:30:36 Yan Find out about these issues and resolve these issues. 00:30:40 Yan As they grow seem much more effectively even to this day, even the project Ninja concluded almost a year ago. 00:30:45 Yan This proof of concept that Microsoft helped with whenever we have a question, we can go straight to the the Project Ninja team which is Ben in his team and they. 00:30:59 Yan Alex Cloud, if you know him. 00:31:00 Yan Thank you Alex for everything it they actually help us resolve these issues in question. 00:31:06 Yan On a much faster way that otherwise would have been possible, right? 00:31:09 Yan So so it Microsoft not only providing with the tools, but also as an enterprise providing with the support to make that transition on a much more structure and safer way. 00:31:19 Yan And we're very grateful for that. 00:31:22 Yan And so yeah, it's it's been a fantastic journey so far. 00:31:26 Ben And just to clarify, Project Ninja isn't our official team name, sadly. 00:31:32 Yan It is we we, we called internally Project Ninja and and we called Ben a Samurai. 00:31:37 Yan But you know, we didn't ask him for his permission so. 00:31:42 Matt But just to clarify Ben that nobody your team name changes so often that nobody really. 00:31:46 Ben Yes, I honestly don't know what it is this week to be honest. 00:31:46 Matt Knows what it is so. 00:31:51 Matt So bill. 00:31:51 Yan I recommend ninja. 00:31:53 Yan I'm fine Sir. 00:31:54 Matt Bill I, I see that you you have your hand up so. 00:31:59 Bill Yeah, well I'm listening here and new technologies are obviously speaking a different language to to me, and it's just very interesting, so I just give a a client perspective that you you don't believe what you guys really do. 00:32:12 Bill You know you're talking this different language in Ukiah, Sam Ranjan. 00:32:16 Bill Ninjas and and all this off. 00:32:19 Bill Thing going on in the background, but. 00:32:21 Bill You your technology quite categorically, is saving construction workers life. 00:32:28 Bill It's quite simply so I can't thank you enough and please continue to do all the great work and I love the fighters open source people here putting their time in almost in a charitable way to build these platforms in the background to make it easier for you guys to build the applications. 00:32:46 Bill Because your applications are saving lives and I can't thank you enough. 00:32:49 For that. 00:32:50 Matt Well, thank you for saying that Bill and I'm sure our listeners are. 00:32:53 Matt Very grateful and happy to hear that because it's absolutely true, gentleman, Ben, Bill Yan and Shri Ram. 00:33:00 Matt Thank you very much for having for joining us today. 00:33:04 Matt A very important app and. 00:33:08 Matt Thank you everybody for listening. 00:33:09 Matt This is Ben. 00:33:11 Matt The Net Maui podcast.