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.
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.
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.
Jim Wilson (a.k.a. hedgehogjim) 