Some of the Best Xamarin Tutorials We Could Find

Xamarin continues to be the hot toolset for developing cross-platform mobile apps. Xamarin the company was originally founded in 2011 by the engineers who developed Mono. Microsoft swooped in and acquired Xamarin in February, 2016. Now it operates in lock-step with Visual Studio as the preferred dev environment for mobile apps.

Build Apps with Native UI Using Xamarin in Visual Studio

As you would expect, Microsoft provides dazzlingly clear step-by-step tutorials on its newly acquired mobile app cross-platform development environment. “Once you've done the steps in Setup and install and Verify your Xamarin environment, this walkthrough shows you how to build a basic Xamarin app (shown below) with native UI layers. With native UI, shared code resides in a portable class library (PCL) and the individual platform projects contain the UI definitions.

You'll do these things to build it:

• Set up your solution
• Write shared data service code
• Design UI for Android
• Design UI for Windows Phone

These steps create a Xamarin solution with native UI that contains a PCL for shared code and two added NuGet packages.

• In Visual Studio, create a new Blank App (Native Portable) solution and name it WeatherApp. You can find this template most easily by entering Native Portable into the search field.
• After clicking OK to create the solution, you’ll have a number of individual projects.
• Add the Newtonsoft.Json and NuGet package to the PCL project, which you’ll use to process information retrieved from a weather data service.”

This example that has you link to a weather app goes on to provide code snippets and excruciatingly detailed step-by-step guidance. This is one of the better spots to check with if you’re launching into the world of Xamarin coding.

C# Corner

And in this corner, you’ll find a refreshingly diverse and encompassing series of Xamarin tutorials. They cover a range of topics; including xamarin.forms, troubleshooting issues, and various cross-platform app development subjects. It’s easy to find what you need. Individual tutorials are presented in a well-organized table of contents. Recent posts include:

Certificate Pinning in Xamarin.Forms, by Alessandro Del Sole: "Securing communications between applications and services is extremely important, and mobile apps are no exception. Even if you use an encrypted channel based on HTTPS, you should never completely trust the identity of the target. For example, an attacker could easily discover the URL your application is pointing to, and put a fake certificate in the middle of the communication between an application and the server, thus intercepting the communication. This is extremely dangerous especially if the application handles sensitive data. In order to avoid this, a technique called certificate pinning can be used to dramatically reduce the risk of this kind of man-in-the-middle attack. This article describes how to implement certificate pinning in Xamarin.Forms, making your mobile apps more secure."

Xamarin.Forms Problem “Could Not Connect to Debugger” Solution, by Munib Ch: "There are some issues traced in the Xamarin 15.2 release. One of the major issued faced by developers is a debugging error.

• The app is deployed
• The app starts on the emulator
• It immediately stops
• You get one or more messages in your output window

This issue is faced by many of the developers who are new in this field. This issue was first faced in Visual Studio 2015. This issue is resolved by ReSharper but it is costly. So I will give you the simple solution for that issue."

Xamarin.Forms—Working with Application Storage, by Delpin Susai Raj: "This article covers working with Application Storage to save app settings on the app in the Xamarin forms App. Xamarin.Forms code runs on multiple platforms -- each of which has its own filesystem. This means that reading and writing files are the most easily done tasks using native file APIs on each platform. Alternatively, embedded resources are also a simpler solution to distribute the data files with an app."

Introduction to Xamarin Forms ReturnType Key, by Sumit Singh Sisodia: "Today, I would like to tell you about Entry Key ReturnType. I'll tell you how to change ReturnKeyType keys like Search, Done, Next etc. In this article I am using Xamarin Forms PORTABLE and XAML.

• In IOS: We have UITextField which has a ReturnKeyType property that you can set to a pre-assigned list.
• In Android: We have EntryEditText which has an ImeOptions property which helps in changing the EditText Key for Keyboard button.

Why Choose Xamarin for Cross Platform Mobile Apps with Visual Studio? by Mukesh Kumar: "Nowadays, everyone wants to use mobile apps rather than websites because they are easy to use with your smartphones. But, do you think mobile apps development is easy? No. Mobile app development is not an easy task due to the availability of different platforms like iOS, Android, and Windows. When we create a website, it is accessible from any device from an Android phone to your laptop. But when you create an App, it is not always accessible from all platforms."

Xamarin Tutorial—For Beginners & Professionals

This blog presents another “table of contents” type of listing of various posts covering various Xamarin development topics. As the title says, some are more basic and some more advanced. Shailendra Chauhan is clearly their Xamarin expert, being the author of all these posts. Recent posts include:

“Xamarin with Visual Studio 2017—Build native cross-platform apps:"Along with the launch of Visual Studio 2017, Microsoft has released many fresh and exciting features for mobile developers to develop cross-platform mobile apps using Xamarin. Visual Studio 2017 will help you to build better native cross-platform apps in less time as compared to Visual Studio 2015."

Xamarin Forms Fundamentals: "Xamarin Forms allows developers to build cross-platform mobile app using the common UI pages, layouts, views, controls, and design patterns. At runtime, each Xamarin Forms UI element will be mapped to its native equivalent element in each platform, so that truly native UI can be build and rendered."

Understanding Xamarin Forms—Build Native Cross Platform Mobile Apps: "Xamarin Forms is a part of Xamarin family to build truly native apps for iOS, Android & Windows from a single and shared code base using C#. Xamarin.Forms offers the UI controls/views which you can use to develop UI. These UI controls/view at run-time are converted to platform-specific UI controls.

Understanding Xamarin iOS—Build Native iOS App: Xamarin.iOS is a part of Xamarin family to build native iOS app with C# and Xamarin. Xamarin.iOS offers the same UI controls that are available in Objective-C or swift language and Xcode."

Understanding Xamarin Android—Build Native Android App: "Xamarin.Android is a part of Xamarin family to build native Android app with C# and Xamarin. Xamarin.Android provides the same UI controls as you have in Android with Java. Understanding Xamarin—A Cross Platform Solution: Xamarin is a free open-source framework to build truly native cross-platform mobile apps using C# .NET for iOS, Android or Windows. It runs on Mono and .NET to build apps with native performance and native UI. Xamarin allows you to develop native apps using C# language and platform specfic tools/SDKs and share the same code across multiple platforms like iOS, Android or Windows."

Xamarin Apps vs. Native Apps vs. Hybrid Apps: Today we are living in the age of mobile phones. Every one using mobile phones for various daily activities like chatting, sharing, shopping, and so on. Mobile apps have changed the way of browsing the web and doing online activities.”

Posted by Lafe Low on 03/15/2018