Five Things to Love About Xamarin.Forms 3.5

Live, Love, Bike, & Code. James Montemagno is a Principal Program Manager for Xamarin at Microsoft. He has been a .NET developer since 2005 working in a wide range of industries including game development, printer software, and web services. James has been a professional mobile developer on the Xamarin platform since 2011, with several published apps on iOS, Android, and Windows. In his spare time he is most likely cycling around Seattle or guzzling gallons of coffee at a local coffee shop. He can be found on Twitter @JamesMontemagno, on his personal blog montemagno.com, or his weekly development podcast Merge Conflict at mergeconflict.fm
Comments
Share (Xamarin.Essentials API of the Week)
Snack Pack: Xamarin.Essentials - Cross-Platform APIs for Mobile Apps
@Yordan: Xamarin.Essentials can be used with any iOS/Android/UWP application.
@BlueRaja: That is correct, and we provide helpers to get to specific locations when using System.IO
@brandwooddixon: We have an open ticket to investigate Bluetooth down the road.
How to Create and Manage Your Own Android Emulators
@Claudiu: Hey there, they are populated from our list that we create. Ensure that you have the latest version of Visual Studio as we have added more into the mix lately.
Building Your First Android & iOS App in Visual Studio 2017
@TheRoyLink:Awesome!
Building Your First Android & iOS App in Visual Studio 2017
@LouieInSeattle:Was this on the PC? Seems like maybe an issue with the Android emulator. Sometimes a cold boot occurs on android emulators based on different machine resources. It should startup after. Did it eventually boot?
New Xamarin.Android Editor + Designer Features
@fodoom: Shoot me an email about your setup and I will get you in contact with our PM motz @ microsoft . com
Snack Pack: Xamarin.Essentials - Cross-Platform APIs for Mobile Apps
@halheinrich you can find the sample here: https://github.com/jamesmontemagno/app-compass
User Interface Automation with App Center Test
@Arne: Absolutely. Checkout a list of devices: http://testcloud.xamarin.com/devices
Episode 35: iOS Designer for Xamarin Updates with Alex Corrado
@Rob: Hey there, I am a bit confused on the question I guess.
For traditional iOS/Android we use Storyboards/Android XML separate user interfaces with shared code. Our designer for iOS will automagically set the Outlet when you update the name of a control in it. This way you don't need to update any headers or anything like that, it just generates the code.
It sounds like you are talking more about Xamarin.Forms, our cross platform user interface library. To name a control you would just use x:Name="Name" to expose it in the code behind. Or do data binding to it. We have some great docs here: https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/xamarin-forms/xaml/xaml-basics/
I would also recommend my MVVM episode: https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/XamarinShow/Introduction-to-MVVM
SmartHotel360 Demo App Mobile Apps
@CodeGrue: Thanks for the question. When I speak plugins I usually mean abstractions of platform APIs: https://github.com/xamarin/XamarinComponents
There are a lot of different routes that developers can go for MVVM and DI code. Xamarin.Forms itself has a full dependency service built right in. The team was really familiar with Autofac so they used a bit of that in the app.
The great part about Xamarin apps is that they are .NET apps so you can use what libraries you and your team feel comfortable with :)
Episode 24: Xamarin Live Player
@mrjimmy: Yes a mac is still required to compile your entire application to install on device or simulator. With the live player we are interpreting your source code, not compiling or installing your app.
Snack Pack 15: Upgrading to Xamarin.Forms to .NET Standard
@StephenH1: You can do it following these few steps: https://gist.github.com/jamesmontemagno/cebc8646d92e127e8adc35236dafab24