Contribution Ideas

Occasionally I get asked about "what can I do to help?"

I love this question - and we'd love to get you involved - thanks :)

If you want to get involved, below are a list of some things I know need working on today. If you want to work on them, then why not start a Pull Request today :)

Beyond these, "bigger ticket" activities, there are also plenty of open issues on https://github.com/MvvmCross/MvvmCross/issues and I'm also hoping to produce a list of small "starter" tasks soon...

With all items, please do think about how some of them might be achievable through separate repos, plugins and projects rather than committing into core - you may not believe this, but MvvmCross itself tries to keep itself "slim" - there's no

The bigger items:

• Android:

  • some samples of BroadcastReceivers and Background Tasks (and maybe content providers too) would be great to have.

• Adding a new async assembly - to add some async APIs for MvvmCross (not sure what these are right now - so maybe best to just start with a new non-Mvx assembly and to experiment - then pull them into the "official" namespace after we've worked them out)

• Integrating "Jupiter" - I think that's codename for the fast approaching WinPhone 8.1 and WinStore combined "Universal" Xaml project type.

• Taking AutoViews to the next level... this is quite vague at present...

• There are quite a few plugins which could be built - especially around file, SQL and network await/async APIs; and also possibly around push notificiations; around payments/licensing; and around device-specific APIs too (gyroscope, compass, etc)

• There are a lot of scripts and sample projects we need to build if we're to get the framework and all the plugins into the Xamarin Component store. This isn't entirely straight-forward (as the Xam Component store lacks things like dependencies) but could be interesting to do - Pete Mourfield has already started on some of this - https://github.com/MvvmCross/MvvmCross/pull/451 - but I'm sure he'd appreciate the help

• I know that one user has a 'half written' Xamarin Studio equivalent of the Ninja VS plugin - it would be interesting to get this more fully released.

• There are some interesting samples which could be built or completed - for example, Redth'shttps://github.com/Redth/JabbRIsMobile is good on Android but not done on other platforms (yet)

• Automating some of our QA - possibly using Xamarin Test Cloud - would be an interesting set of tasks (although I'm a bit biased here - I've written code like this before!)

• Adding more unit tests

  • we really could do with quite a few more... sorry... but at least I try to add new ones now when we fix or add things

• Push messaging samples

  • Would love to see some cross-platform samples on how to integrate push messages

• Third Party Service samples

  • Would love to see some cross-platform samples on how to integrate with Azure Mobile Services, with Parse, with Buddy, etc

• Samples

  • Write an app and blog about how it's written - always fab to hear more. Doesn't have to be an open source app - but the more info you can share the more other's will learn from it.

• Documentation

  • There's heaps more we could write...

• Mac

  • Currently our Mac support is in a bit of limbo. Deapsquatter and tokutim have both done amazing work getting it up and running(especially Tim recently - super stuff!), but we're struggling to integrate it because of build issues (there's some hacking to make it build on PC), license issues with Xam (another $1000) and because of Nuget distribution issues (How do you ship MonoMac and XamMac assemblies?). Would love to get these resolved and pushed forwards somehow

• Unity

  • We have a fab port of out code for NGUI on Unity - what more can we do to help those guys out?

• Dot42

  • I would love to see Dot42 C# supported - the more C# the better. First step here would be getting a proof of concept ported - e.g. getting the ApiExamples app up and running under Dot42

• Hydrogene

  • I would love to see Hydrogene C# supported - the more C# the better. First step here would be getting a proof of concept ported - e.g. getting the ApiExamples apps up and running under iOS and Android on Hydrogene

• Splat

  • Is there any way we can integrate Splat into our code? Is it just a case of shipping some samples that say how to do this? (This has been on my todo list for months...)

• Cimbalino

  • There is so much useful stuff in Cimbalino for WinPhone development - how could we integrate it better into PCL code? Could we mimic parts of it in iOS and Droid too?

• Hamburgers

  • We've seen great repos and blog posts from James and Frank about using SlidingPanels on MvvmCross - can we make a single repo about how to do this cross-platform? Can we show lots more presentation techniques there too?

• CrossLight

  • MvvmCross is brilliant - but it's also WRONG - you could do better. Why not start your own Mvvm libraries, tutorials or samples based on top of our CrossLight layer?

• More contribution help - making it easier to contribute - this could be just as simple as adding a contributions.md file, adding gitattributes, etc or it could be a much larger exercise - I am slow to release the keys to MvvmCross but I'm open to ideas!

• Todo - there's always more here :)