Prism OnNavigatingTo no longer fires - xamarin

We have been using Prism.Unity.Forms (version 7.1.0.431) with Xamarin.Forms for several months with good results. We currently tried to upgrade to (version 7.2.0.1367),which introduced a major change in behavior. It appears that the OnNavigatingTo event, which we use throughout out our app, no longer fires after the update. I was able to reproduce this behavior with a simple sample app. Is this a known bug/issue?

Short answer: yes. There were some breaking changes regarding Navigation in the latest Prim Release:
After numerous user survey's and interviews it became apparent that
the intent of INavigatingAware had been become unclear and that users
were actually overwhelmingly asking for a breaking change.
INavigatingAware is no longer supported. For those who may be using
OnNavigatingTo with INavigationAware this will be most impactful as a
behavior change as INavigatingAware has been removed from
INavigationAware meaning that it will no longer be called. For those
who have implemented INavigatingAware directly you will see a build
error. The impact should be minimal by simply renaming all instances
of INavigatingAware to Initialize.
You can read the full release notes here.

Related

Check if WM_PARENTNOTIFY is deprecated API?

According to docs WM_PARENTNOTIFY seems to be deprecated, this sounds unusual but if this is the case then what API does replace it?
WM_PARENTNOTIFY message
It's not deprecated, you just happen to hit a bit outdated link.
The most recent I believe is this one.
You seem to have gotten confused by the disclaimer on this documentation entry. There are two parts to it:
We're no longer updating this content regularly.
This refers to the documentation itself. It got frozen at some point, when Microsoft decided to change their documentation site for the n-th time (with n > 3). Though it's probably the second part that had you confused:
Check the Microsoft Product Lifecycle for information about how this product, service, technology, or API is supported.
Since this documentation no longer receives updates, there's no promise made as to whether the content still applies. It could (and generally is) still accurate, but it could be wrong or outdated as well, and you would need to check elsewhere.
That elsewhere is here: WM_PARENTNOTIFY. It would certainly be nice to have the old documentation auto-redirect to the new content (and sometimes this works, too, easily identifiable by a query string that contains the redirectedfrom=MSDN parameter). If in doubt you can identify up-to-date documentation by an Edit link at the top right corner.

What to do about "The Components object is deprecated. It will soon be removed." in dev tools Console

For almost every page I open in Firefox, I see this error in the Console of the developer tool bar:
(!) The Components object is deprecated. It will soon be removed.
The source is the html page. It happens with pages I create, but also on many common websites.
I found this documentation on Components object on MDN web docs, but that does not clarify a lot. Note that even that page shows this message(!)
It looks like a warning, but according to the Console filter, it is an error.
My main questions are:
Is this something for me, as a developer of the page reporting this, to solve?
If so, how do I go about that?
I am not aware of any problems as a result of this. For now, that is.
I have seen this for over a year, maybe longer. I mostly ignore this, but every now and then it starts nagging me again. I don't want my code to break suddenly and would like to get rid of this message obscuring other messages.
This is not for the developer of the page to solve.
While biking back home, a possible cause popped up in my mind: could one of the add-ons I use cause this and yes, that appears to be the case.
I restarted with disabled add-ons and the message was gone.
Then I enabled them one at a time and the culprit is
Selenium IDE.
A bug report on this issue was closed with Won't fix, with the message:
This error will resolve itself when we move to a native app later this year.
In a MozillaZine topic of 2012, it is explained how it could have been solved.
The first one is just a warning that the addon is using "Components"
directly, which won't necessarily always be possible when using the
Add-on SDK. (The preferred way to do it is to access the aliases for
Components.classes and Components.interfaces and such that the SDK
provides by requiring the "chrome" module.) It shouldn't be a problem
right now, but might become one in the future.
it happened for me after installing Selenium plugin in my FireFox.

How to migrate/update to newer version of Xamarin.Forms?

I have some xamarin.forms 1.xx( I dont know which version) project on multiple platforms Android and iOS. And I've been asked to upgrade it to the maximum available right now version of xamarin.forms.
Therefore, I have 2 questions:
1) How to determine which version of forms I'm using right now (I'm working in Windows environment using Visual Studio 2015 ).
2) How to migrate/update to newest version of forms? (step by step, if it's possible). I have no idea how the result of that kind of operation supposed to look like, cuz I have never done anything like this before in my life. And what the best practices are?
What I've done is opened VS2015->Help->Xamarin release notes, however there was nothing about version of Forms I'm using. Also, I went to the official xamarin website and there was no guide how to do that. I also tried to look at the release notes the last Forms update and trying to find and fix differences, but my project is so big and I thought that this way doesn't seems right.
I'll answer first the What are the best practice regarding upgrading a Xamarin.Forms application? first and then address your other concerns.
I recently upgraded from 1.5.1 to 2.3.2, and from my experience, this is the steps to go through:
Decide which version you will upgrade from and to.
Read the change logs for all stabled releases between these two versions and look for breaking changes/bugfixes. You can find the release notes on Xamarin's website or on NuGet's website too.
Check regularly for new releases on the Xamarin.Forms forum and check if any reported issues may affect you. Every time Xamarin makes a release, there is a thread full of comments from other developers that may have encountered issues you might be interested in.
Using your favorite versioning software, make sure that all local changes are commited or stashed and create a new branch for your Xamarin.Forms upgrade (you don't know how long the upgrade will take and you still want to be able to send patches during the process)
Upgrade: Read the Important notes at Xamarin.Forms 2.3.2 release notes, especially the When upgrading Xamarin.Forms take care not to simply "update all" as ... part. Remember to upgrade on your PCL project, on your iOS project and on your Android project.
Test your whole app on as many devices as possible and for the longest possible period before you merge your branch back into your development/master/Main branch and address the potential incompatibility issues that may have been created in your development/master/Main simultaneously.
Step 3 is very important as it will allow you to reset back to your starting point and restart if you should fail to upgrade for whatever reason.
Xamarin.Forms is moving fast so it's important that you always keep an eye on what's going on even if you don't upgrade.
Which version am I using right now?
You can check that in the NuGet package interface or in the packages.json file in your project.

The resulting API analysis is too large when upload app to mac store

I am going to upload my first mac app to Apple Store
And fixed all validation bugs of icon,category...
But after then I passed validation with warning :
The resulting API analysis file is too large. We were unable to validate your API usage prior to delivery. This is just an informational message.
And my upload be rejected with the reason : "Invalid binary"
Is there anyone has experience of this case ?
UPDATE : this warning is not the reason of rejecting, it maybe the app archiving problem. I successfully released my app to store.
So, we can safely ignore that.
Apple forbids using private or undocumented APIs in iOS apps. Any calls you make to methods that have the same name as private or undocumented API methods will be flagged as a private API use, even if the method being called is something you have defined yourself.
App Loader does an initial scan, checking for method names, instance variable access, and even #selector usage with private method names. App Loader doesn't always do a great job, and the more source files you have the more likely it is to give you the warning that the API analysis file it has generated is "too large".
Fortunately, you can still submit your application, despite of the warning. Apple will check it internally, and if something gets kicked back because of overlapping names, you'll have to wade through the review process again.
Erika Sadun tried to make an app called API Kit that would do the scanning for you, but she appears to have abandoned her work and removed any trace of the application from her website.
Chimp Studios created App Scanner to do the same thing, but it hasn't been updated since 2011. Unfortunately, for large projects -- and this includes projects with a lot of extra pods from CocoaPods -- there is no current (2014) good way of solving this problem other than proactively naming things such that they won't conflict with private API method and instance names.
You can proactively learn about Apple's Cocoa Naming Conventions and try to anticipate. That will reduce future headaches. Until Apple introduces something like namespaces, however, we may continue to run into this problem from time to time.
The "invalid binary" error can come from a number of causes, but it is entirely unrelated to the API analysis document created by App Loader.
You should know that even with the scanning, there are still ways to get around the prohibition on using private/undocumented APIs. :)
After hitting this issue for the first time on my first Swift project, it looks like the most common answer to this question is now:
If you use Swift 2.x and XCode 7, you'll get this error. Just ignore it.
[UPDATE: XCode 7.3 & iOS 9.3 rollout seems to have fixed this issue!]
Here is an easy way to get around them... store the selector name in reverse, like "dlroWolleH", then reverse the string before you call the method.
If Apple gets wise to that then you can encrypt them.

How to integrate Firefox Sync?

Firefox 4 comes soon (ok, next year ;)) and there is a Firefox plugin to sync your bookmarks etc. with Firefox 3.whatever .
I would like to know if anyone has a comprehensive, up-to-date tutorial to integrate Firefox Sync into your own plugin? Or any idea regarding this?
I mainly followed this official "tutorial" and also this blog post, but the information seems to be slightly outdated.
For example, the object is not called Weave anymore but Engines and the weave.engines. preference became services.sync.engines.. I played a little with all the mentioned options, but it does not seems to work (and my plugin does not show up in list where you can select what to sync).
I assume that the Tracker and Store classes are fine, the main problem is to register the engine...
The ClientAPI tutorial you mention is definitely the way to go. I updated it recently so if something's not working, please let us know so I can fix it in the docs. Wladimir's blogpost is definitely quite old and contains some outdated information. We will also make changes to some parts of the API in the upcoming beta releases, so be prepared for some flux...
The Weave namespace is still the canonical way to access Sync related APIs from UI code. It exposes components such as Weave.Service and Weave.Engines. You can import it via Components.utils.import("resource://services-sync/main.js"). If you want to implement your own engine, you'll have to import the actual underlying modules, though (all listed in the ClientAPI tutorial). The tutorial also describes how to register your custom engine implementation. Once it's registered, it won't automatically show up in the preferences UI, though. I suggest building your own UI that flips the services.sync.engine.YOURENGINE pref in your add-on's preferences.
Out of curiosity, what kind of data are you trying to sync?

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