For many it may come as a surprise that I put this together or even that I published it. After all normally you would hear me talk about how you should use Prism. You might ask has something changed? The answer is no, nothing has changed. I do however understand that sometimes you might want something that is minimalistic and works with Shell. While I continue to believe Shell is the exact wrong answer for any Enterprise application, there are still a whole host of small apps out there for which Shell may be a good fit. So why write yet another MVVM Framework for it?

The truth is that I've looked at what's out there, and needless to say I feel they miss the mark in some very significant ways.

Authentication in mobile apps is often a critical step, but far more complicated than it really should be. .NET 6.0 Minimal APIs really helps us write less and produce exactly what we need. But the setup to get Microsoft, Google and yes just because we picked those 2 we are now forced (thanks a lot Apple) to use Sign in with Apple. Of course Apple being Apple couldn't be like everyone else so there are a few steps that you need to take in order to get setup. Even once we've got our Client Id & Client Secret for Microsoft & Google, plus our Service Id, Team Id, & Auth Key from Apple setting these up and having a token that you can use to now have Authenticated Endpoints, well it's a hot mess. 

Most .NET Development shops have a tendency to build up a lot of code over the years. Naturally many of our clients that have been around for a while have some pretty horrible ways of managing code because how on earth do you make it easier share code from one developer to another or one team to another? Perhaps one of the most amusing things is that we already knew the answer because we use it everyday as .NET developers. The answer of course is NuGet. Now of course putting closed source, proprietary code up on NuGet.org would be a horrible idea, but the NuGet tool isn't tightly coupled to NuGet.org.

Prism has long been considered the premiere choice of frameworks for developing Xamarin.Forms applications with more than 1.3 million downloads of just the Prism.Forms NuGet package alone! Why has Prism been the gold standard for app development? For starters Prism originated around 2008 from the Microsoft Patterns and Practices team for WPF development. Prism was never about basic MVVM helpers like providing a base implementation of INotifyPropertyChanged and ICommand, with perhaps a ViewModelLocator thrown in for good measure. Sure Prism has all of these things but Prism has always been about giving you the tools you need to actually develop your app which includes an understanding of the platform you're working with to give you the ability to Navigate. This is a key feature that makes Prism an actual MVVM Framework for building Highly Modular, Highly Testable XAML applications rather than just a set of MVVM Helpers like MvvmLight or the new Microsoft.Toolkit.Mvvm.

Welcome to a brand new AvantiPoint.com! Truth be told this has been a long time coming. A lot has changed for us since we first launched in 2014 and it was time for an update. After all our website was running on ASP.NET Core 1.0 preview 2... 

We've been hard at work this year and are kicking things off with a brand new website to better help our amazing clients. This long overdue refresh of our website is finally giving us a brand new blog to keep you up to date with what you need to know in the Mobile Development space, and we encourage you to sign up below for updates when we post. In addition to the new website, we're proud to announce our brand new Customer Portal. This portal is a great place to access private resources and better interact with us.