As you may know, I began digging into Xamarin at the end of last year. It showed a lot of promise as a great way to create cross-platform iOS and Android apps leveraging the existing Visual Studio and C# skills that so many developers have.
When I first started working with it, I did have some initial concerns as I talked about in these 2 blog posts.
- iOS/Android with Visual Studio/C# Using Xamarin, First Impressions: A Little Frustrating
- iOS/Android/VisualStudio/C#/Xamarin – Getting a Working iOS Build
I have to say though, once I got past those initial hurdles, things are definitely looking up.
So far I’m doing mostly basic stuff but overall things are going well.
My two main issues are
- Visual Studio seems to occasionally have difficulty attaching to the iOS build server
- The Visual Studio Android UI designer doesn’t work as well with RelativeLayout as Android Studio does
Neither of these are show-stoppers though.
In the case of connecting to the iOS build server, in most cases restarting Visual Studio takes care of the problem.
For the designer, the Visual Studio designer is workable and if I want to, I can use the Android Studio designer to do the layout work and then just copy it over to the Visual Studio project.
So that’s a long way of saying…
Using Xamarin within Visual Studio is getting a thumbs up so far.
Keep watching as I push on it harder to see how it does as the problem complexity increases.
If you’re interested in doing iOS/Android development with Xamarin, Part 1 of my Pluralsight course series on the topic just went live today…
Jim Wilson (a.k.a. hedgehogjim) 