Tag: C#

Programming Stuff

My Xamarin Forms Course is Live at Pluralsight

on March 5, 2015

My Introduction to Xamarin Forms course is now up on Pluralsight. The initial feedback has been fantastic.

Here’s a list of the modules from the course.

  • Building Your First Xamarin Forms App
  • Understanding Xamarin Forms
  • Providing UI Behavior with Views and XAML
  • Xamarin Forms ListViews
  • Xamarin Forms Layouts
  • Xamarin Forms Pages
  • Handling Platform Specific Requirements

The course is designed to give you a high-level look at Xamarin Forms and give you an idea of what working in Xamarin Forms is like. It’s super code intensive … lots of codes w/ very few slides.

I encourage you to check it out. I think you’ll like it.

BTW: If you haven’t worked in Xamarin (which is not the same thing as Xamarin Forms … but they’re closely related), you might want to check out my 2-part series Building Cross-Platform iOS/Android Apps with Xamarin, Visual Studio, and C#.

And if you’re looking to have a little more fun, I talk about using  Xamarin to build a Google Glass app in Creating a Google Glass App with C# and Xamarin.

I love writing these courses … I hope you enjoy them.

Programming Stuff

Cross Platform iOS/Android with Visual Studio and C# (Xamarin) Series Complete

on March 12, 2014

I’ve been working with Xamarin a great deal the past several months and am increasingly becoming a fan of the product. The ability to leverage the Visual Studio IDE,  familiar .NET class libraries, and C#programming language to create both Android and iOS apps provides incredible power.

Xamarin_iOS_Android

The beauty of working with Xamarin is that it allows us to share code when doing so makes sense but Xamarin also embraces the unique features of each platform. Xamarin does this by going beyond the many .NET classes that we’re all familiar with to also include .NET classes that expose the features of each platform.

As an example, the features of Android activities are available through a .NET Android.App.Activity class. Similarly, there’s a .NET MonoTouch.UIKit.UITableViewController class that makes the iOS UITableViewController features available. The platform-specific features provided by Xamarin are extremely rich and comprehensive giving us access to most any platform features we’re likely to use.

By having both the standard .NET classes and platform-specific .NET classes we’re able to build our application’s core logic just once, sharing that logic across both platforms, while also having full access to each platform’s unique capabilities and features.

If you’d like to learn more about working with Xamarin, I encourage you to checkout my 2 part course series on cross-platform app development with iOS and Android. Pluralsight just published part 2 of the series this week.

CrossPlatformiOSAndroidVSCSharpPart1_WithLogo

CrossPlatformiOSAndroidVSCSharpPart2_WithLogo

BTW: Although the 2-part series on cross-platform iOS/Android development with .NET/C# is complete there’s still a lot more to content to come. Keep watching for more courses on using Xamarin to create Android and iOS apps.