Learning with Xamarin mini-hacks

Looking for a nice way to learn more about Xamarin platform? I thought these mini-hacks would be a good way to begin with.

These mini-hacks work as basic tutorials for beginners in the Xamarin platform.

The beginning (or what is ?)

Xamarin is a platform where you can develop native iOS, Android and Windows apps using C#.

Is it worth it?

With this platform you are able to deliver native apps with native performance. See more about performance on this post of Harry Cheung, or here for a reduced version.

The mini-hacks

Since there was a contest going on during the Xamarin Evolve 16, I decided to start with the three suggested:

#1 Microsoft Cognitive Services

The main goal of this mini-hack was to create an app that could use the device camera and consume the Microsoft Emotion API to determine the happiness of the faces in a photo.

#2 Azure Mobile Services

This was a pretty straight-forward one. The intent here was to create an app that could read/write in a SQL database. All of that using Azure, the Microsoft cloud platform.

#3 HockeyApp

The purpose here was to link an app with HockeyApp, a mobile DevOps platform.

The Result

As part of the contest I had to create a video to show my apps working properly. And you can see it here:

Conclusions

I spent a quite long time trying to solve a problem with free provisioning profile. All that to be able to deploy my iOS app to my real device. And this seems to be a very common and tricky problem.

Using Xamarin the app logic can be written just once and shared among all different platforms (Android, iOS etc.).

Even though you can create a shared UI with Xamarin.Forms, this approach is most suitable for simple apps. When the app UI gets more complex it is necessary to create specific UI projects for each platform.

What do you think about Xamarin? Is it worth it? Let us know in the comments.