Release Candidate 1

We are excited to announce the first release candidate for IceLink 3! There should be no further changes to the existing API leading up to the final release next month, with all efforts focused now on identifying and resolving bugs, making sure fringe use cases from IceLink 2 are covered, and wrapping up the getting started and migration guides.

There were a few weak areas in Developer Preview 3 which should be up to our standards now:

• Audio quality and echo cancellation on Android, .NET, and Java should be vastly improved.
• Echo cancellation is available for both 32-bit and 64-bit ARM architectures on Android. 32-bit Intel support is underway for the final release.
• Several bug fixes in the TCP client logic. Note that there is a known bug still in the iOS/macOS SDK when shutting down a TCP allocation. The fix is already in place for the next release.

In addition:

• All iOS and macOS examples have been updated to use Automatic Reference Counting (ARC).
• There are now Swift examples for iOS and macOS.

Several of you have asked about a WPF VideoChat example, which is coming soon. In the meantime, the WinForms examples can be modified for WPF by replacing WinForms.PictureBoxSink with Wpf.ImageSink and by replacing WinForms.LayoutManager with Wpf.LayoutManager. IceLink 3 is, and always will be, codec-agnostic, signalling-agnostic, and framework-agnostic.

Coming soon:

• Xamarin libraries and examples. We are taking the transition from IceLink 2 to 3 as a way to do a deep dive into our practices surrounding code re-use for frameworks like Xamarin that add an additional layer of abstraction between the developer and the underlying platform. We believe that applications built with Xamarin should share the same performance characteristics as their native counterparts, and appreciate your patience as we work to make this a reality.