Microsoft recently announced that they are accepting community contributions to the .NET MAUI Community Toolkit. To help facilitate these community contributions, Microsoft has improved the workflow for adding new features.

Microsoft also created a GitHub Project Board in order to keep track of the new workflow where interested users can follow along. The new feature workflow was inspired by the C# team’s current workflow and it leverages their implementation of discussions and proposals. 

The new workflow functions in seven steps, users begin by opening a discussion, next they open a new feature proposal, after a new proposal is opened, a member of the .NET MAUI Community Toolkit team will choose to be its champion, once the proposal is approved the user can start writing code, the next step is the pull request approval (pending documentation), after the documentation has been completed, it will be reviewed, approved, and merged by a member of the .NET MAUI Community Toolkit team, once the pull request is merged the users code will be officially added to the toolkit. 

Google giving away Flutter Apprentice for three months and hosting Flutter Apprentice Book Club

Google announced that for the next three months it will be giving away Razeware’s “Flutter Apprentice” book for free along with a book club to those interested in learning Flutter. The book is intended to build on mobile development fundamentals and it takes readers through their first fully-featured Flutter app.

Flutter Apprentice walks readers through designing a complex UI as well as advanced concepts such as persistence, state management, and cloud storage with Firebase. In addition, the book covers publishing on both iOS and Android platforms.

The book is normally $60 to purchase and this free offer is valid through January 6 2022.

Apache weekly update 

ApacheCon, the ASF’s global conference series, completed its 2021 events last week and all presentations are available on the ASF YouTube channel. Over the past week, 305 Apache Committers changed 2,145,460 lines of code over 2,767 commits. The top five contributors are Claus Ibsen, Jarek Potiuk, Tilman Hausherr, Tamas Cservenak, and Jacques Le Roux. 

Apache also announced project updates. Apache Storm 1.2.4, 2.1.1, and 2.2.1 were released, Apache Calcite Avatica 1.19.0 was released, Apache CouchDB 3.2.0 was released, and Apache SharingSphere ElasticJob 3.0.1 was released. In terms of business intelligence, Apache Superset CVE-2021-41971 now has a possible SQL Injection when template processing is enabled.

In addition, Apache OpenOffice 4.1.11, Apache Jackrabbit 2.21.8, Oak 1.22.9, Apache Syncope 2.1.10, Apache SIS 1.1, Apache Camel 3.11.3 (LTS), Apache SkyWalking Client JS 0.7.0, Apache Hop (Incubating) 1.0, Apache Tomcat 8.5.72, Apache Traffic Control 6.0.0, Apache Airflow 2.2.0, and Providers (Amazon 2.3.0) were released last week.