Posts with tag "Xamarin.Forms"

Recently, I've started work on developing a mobile application to interface with one of my employer's server-side products. Because this product is primarily a C# .NET application, we decided to take a look at using Xamarin.Forms, so that we could leverage parts of our existing code-base and also make use of Xamarin's cross-platform capabilities, rather than developing separate native clients using Java on Android, Objective-C on iOS, or C# on Windows Phone. Since we are primarily a C#/HTML/CSS/JS shop, the potential time-savings of being able to reuse our current expertise in .NET programming languages, and only having to learn the Xamarin framework, as opposed to two additional languages and three mobile development frameworks was a huge plus - particularly as some of the technologies that we would use to interact with our server-side product are not officially supported from the native platforms to the same degree as their .NET implementations.

Time will tell if Xamarin.Forms is the correct long-term solution for our needs - on the one hand, our particular application does not need much in the way of device-specific capabilities and customization that Xamarin does not provide access to, but on the other, the licensing costs for Xamarin are somewhat steep. At least for the purposes of rapidly throwing together a prototype proof-of-concept and exploring the feasibility of the idea, using Xamarin.Forms has been a great success - in the equivalent of one week of developer time, we were able to produce a fully-functional prototype.

While I was able to throw together something workable in a short period of time working from the Xamarin sample code, a variety of blog posts, and trawling the Xamarin Forms development forums, the task would have been much easier, and I would have avoided some missteps, if I had taken the time to read a brief overview of the technology beforehand. About midway through the prototype, I happened upon Xamarin Forms Succinctly, which is that quick overview that I was looking for. It is a quick read, at only 148 pages in the PDF version, but it provides a good surface treatment of the concepts and techniques for building simple Xamarin Forms applications - I printed out a copy, put it in a three-ring binder and read through it over the course of a couple of evenings and lunch breaks. It helped a great deal in filling in some of the blanks that I had missed in my more haphazard initial exploration, and it was a great help in revising some of the issues and antipatterns from the inital prototype version of our app.

I would definitely recommend that anyone who is interested in investigating Xamarin Forms and seeing what the technology offers take a few hours and read through Xamarin Forms Succinctly. For the price (free, other than registering an account with SyncFusion), and the time investment required (minimal), it is hard to beat. Besides, it's a gateway into the large library of free, generally high-quality, Succinctly ebooks, which cover a vast array of technical topics in a quick, accessible format.