Xamarin

Xamarin : Results so far

Posted on by burf2000

So, I been playing with Xamarin on and off (damn meetings) and I am slowly getting to grips with it.  I am not a C# developer so while learning Xamarin, I am also learning C#!

I have to be honest, some things I have found a real struggle.  The Android part of my project just died, would not build for toffee, after many hours of search for info, even talking to Xamarin (work call), it turned out to be a corrupt package in a hidden directory.  To be fair, with every new tool, language you are going to learn these issues.

The other random issue which I have not solved is using OpenTk and OpenGL to render a cube on the screen.  This is completely shared code (WOOHOO) however iOS works, Android does not.  One thing I picked up from when speaking to Xamarin is that if any platform is going to break, its Android due to Google pushing updates.  I can respect that!  Android Studio 0.9 -> 1.0 broke every project for me.

The Show must go on!

I can see some real benefits from Xamarin, if I was a C# developer I would be in heaven!  I really want to see whats possible with Xamarin Forms, the holy grail of mobile development (Be warned its not!, its a good technology for a certain job, not all jobs).

In all honestly I don’t have much interest in Xamarin Native which is where you write C# code that directly binds to native Apple/Android Api’s.  I would prefer just to do it in Xcode / Android Studio.

Focus!

I think my personal focus for Xamarin is looking at cross-platform game development using MonoGame or OpenTK.OpenGL.  I either need to learn XNA for MonoGame 3D stuff or see how different the OpenGl is on OpenTK.  This however brings me to the question, why am I not using Unity3D?

My work focus is Xamarin Forms and working out how far you can go with them.  I have been told things like custom pins on a map is a no go on Forms.

I will keep you posted on what I discover!

 

 

Xamarin ???

Posted on by burf2000

This week, I will mostly be looking at Xamarin 🙂

On a serious note, I have been asked at work to take a look at Xamarin and see if it’s something that can be used, and if so for what.  The native iOS/Android developer in me instantly goes NOOO.  However the excited child in me always says yes!

I think I assumed I knew what Xamarin did without actually knowing, and their hugely limited free version kept the hobbiest in me away. However, starting the free trail and looking in to things, shows that actually this is could be pretty cool!  I am not ready to review it yet because I have not made my first app yet, but initial research of a few days is looking promising.

The main decision I need to make is to choose between Xamarin Native and Xamarin Forms.  Xamarin forms does look very good (Universal app) however I don’t think their website info on it is up to date compared to what is actually possible.  They basically say that anything marginally complex should be done in Native.  However if you see some of the stuff people have done, its very impressive.

I hope to do a post by the end of the week on how I got on with making a simple app 🙂