Recently, I was asked to make a mobile application for Android and iOS as a side project. Until now, I only had experience with web development using Angular. So my first thought was to make a PWA. Because I always want to learn new things, the project is not that big and I have a few months, I decided to give Xamarin.Forms a try.
What is Xamarin?
Xamarin is a cross-platform applications development platform from Microsoft built on top of Mono, an open-source version of the .NET Framework. With Xamarin you create a native UI on each platform and write shared business logic in C#. An average of 60 to 80% of the code can be shared. The applications are native, which means that a compiled Xamarin app is the same when you would build the app with Android Studio and Java or Objective-C/Swift and Xcode (when compiling an .apk file is created on Android and an .ipa file on iOS).
With Xamarin.Forms, an open-source UI framework, you can share even more code, with an average of 80 to 90% shared code. In addition to the business logic, you can also share the UI written in XAML.
Used resources for learning Xamarin.Forms
- Pluralsight
- Xamarin: The Big Picture (by Gill Cleeren)
- Xamarin.Forms: The Big Picture (by Jeff Hopper)
- Introduction to Xamarin.Forms (by Jim Wilson)
- Building Xamarin.Forms Applications with XAML (by Gill Cleeren)
- Data Binding in Xamarin.Forms (by Gill Cleeren)
- Books
- Building Xamarin.Forms Mobile Apps Using XAML (by Dan Hermes)
- Xamarin.Forms Solutions (by Gerald Versluis and Steven Thewissen)
In my next blog posts, I will write about my learnings creating my application.
What resources do you use to learn Xamarin?
