Hello all!!!
You’ve probably heard of RxAndroid and have already played with it, I’d imagine. Yes?
You’ve probably never thought of using reactive extensions in Xamarin because… it is just something different entirely…
Well, if you didn’t know, here’s the not-so secret surprise. Reactive extensions have already long existed within the .NET framework since version 4.0, so the good estimate was in 2011. That’s long before RxAndroid started to exist which was mid 2013 observing its commit log!
Therefore, it is really nothing new for functional-oriented programmers. It’s however a very new concept to object-oriented programmers since its style is especially looking for events in some interesting thing.
Depending on the purposes of what your code wants to achieve, sometimes object-oriented principles will play in better than reactive extensions, and the same is true vice-versa.
Usually with object-orientation, if we are passing an object as an input value, then an output value will be given by using this object possibly also giving the ability to change it. In reactive extensions, we have a timeline of events that look for what gets in, and then we get an output.
We’ll go in deeper into the subject in a different blog post.
Merry Christmas, and until next time!
Brian.