Xamarinand Xamarin.Forms

Introduction to Xamarin Xamarin history How is Xamarin Working? Installing Xamarin What is Xamarin. Forms? More information related to Xamarin

Introduction to Xamarin

Introduction to Xamarin

Xamarin is a San Francisco, California based software company created in May 2011 by the engineers that created Mono, MonoTouch and Mono for Android .

With a C# shared codebase, developers can use Xamarin to write native iOS, Android, and Windows apps with native user interface and share code across multiple platforms.

Xamarin has over 505,000 developers in more than 120 countries around the world as of February 2014.

Nat Friedman is the CEO and Co-founder.

Build native UIs for iOS, Android and Windowsfrom a single, shared C# codebase.

Xamarin History

Xamarin History

The Mono open source project was launched on July 19, 2001. Ximian was bought by Novell on August 4, 2003, which was then acquired by Attachmate in April 2011.

In December 2012, Xamarin released Xamarin.Mac. Xamarin 2.0 was released in February 2013 . Xamarin.iOS and

Xamarin.Android make it possible to do native iOS, Android and Windows development in C#, with either Xamarin Studio or Visual Studio.

Introduced in Xamarin 3 on May 28, 2014 and allows one to use portable controls subsets that are mapped to native controls of Android, iOS and Windows Phone.

Xamarin History

In 2014 Xamarin introduced Xamarin. Forms A common UI for mobile platforms A way of reusing ~90% of the code for all mobile platforms Contains a Xamarin XAML that is much like the MS XAML

Supports data-binding, dependency and attached properties

It all compiles to native code

How does Xamarin works?

How does Xamarin works?

The apps created with Xamarin are compiled into native-code For iOS and OS X, Xamarin translates all the .NET code into

Objective-C and C codeThis must happen on a MAC machine

For Android it creates a set of bridges that are installed on the Android deviceSomething like a CLR inside an Android device

For Windows Phone, it just compiles to a Windows Phone app

Xamarin Installation

Xamarin Installation

Installing Xamarin for all OSes is pretty easy: Just download Xamarin Platform Latest:

http://xamarin.com/platform This will set up almost everything needed to create apps

Downloads the necessary JRE, JDK and ADK for AndroidInstalls Xamarin Studio and Plugins for Visual Studio, if

missing

Xamarin Installation

For Windows Phone and iOS there are some additional things to do: Install Windows Phone SDK on Windows

Windows Phone apps can be created only with Visual Studio Install Xcode on OS X

iOS apps can be created only on MAC machine For easier work with Android, install Xamarin Android Player

Works with VirtualBox

Xamarin. Forms

Xamarin. Forms

Xamarin. Forms is the common UI of Xamarin Share ~90% of the code base for each platform

Only the rest 10% are concrete for the platform How to create and run a Xamarin. Forms app?

Create a new project, located at:C# -> Mobile Apps -> Blank App

Write code, select the wanted project as "Startup project" Run in the simulator

How does Xamarin.Forms fit in?

For software developers, the optimum strategy is to target more than just one of these platforms. But that’s not easy. There are three big obstacles: Problem 1: Different development environments

For iOS development, XCode on the Mac. For Android development, Eclipse on a variety of platforms.

For Windows Phone development, Visual Studio on the PC.

Problem 2: Different programming interfaces:-For example, all three platforms have something that lets the user toggle between two states: On the iPhone, it’s a “view” called UISwitch. On Android devices, it’s a “widget” called Switch. On Windows Phone, one possibility is a “control” called

ToggleSwitchButton from the Windows Phone Toolkit NuGet package.

Problem 3: Different programming languages:-Developers have some flexibility in choosing a programming language for each of these three platforms Objective-C for the iPhone Java for Android devices C# for Windows Phone

Xamarin. Forms Pages

Xamarin. Forms Pages represent cross-platform mobile app screens.

Types of Page:- ContentPage MasterDetailPage NavigationPage TabbedPage CarouselPage

ContentPage

A Content Page displays a single View, often a container such as a StackLayout or a ScrollView

MasterDetailPage

The Master Detail Page displays two pages-one master and one detail.

It is usually used to display menus or list of items.

NavigationPage

A Page that manages the navigation and user-experience of a stack of other pages.

TabbedPage The Tabbed Page allows two or more page to be

represent in an array of tabs shown either on the bottom of the screen(iOS) or at the top of the screen(Android).

CarouselPage A carousel Page allows pages to be displayed

using swipe gestures.

Xamarin.Forms Layouts

Xamarin. Forms Layouts are used to compose user interface controls into logical structures.

Layouts StackLayout AbsoluteLayout RelativeLayout GridLayout ContentView ScrollView Frame

StackLayout

AbsoluteLayout

RelativeLayout

GridLayout

ContentView

ScrollView

Frame

More information related to Xamarin

http://developer.xamarin.com/guides/cross-platform/xamarin-forms/introduction-to-xamarin-forms/

Xamarin.FormsLive Demo

Questions?