Xamarin – Making Cross Platform Development Interesting

Very recently, Xamarin 3 has been released by Xamarin – the cross platform development framework. Earlier, Xamarin 2 had linked Visual Studio for the iOS and Android app development using C# and .NET library. Xamarin 3 has increasingly been popular with the developer groups because of its easy and flexible features. One of the highlighting features is that it showcases a methodology to develop and implement apps that cover the umbrella of leading mobile technologies like iOS, Android, Window Phone etc. with the provision of not writing the app for each platform separately from beginning. It is one of the robust frameworks which focus on all leading mobile platforms keeping intact the quality and performance quotient.

As we all know, two thought processes are prevalent today. Native and Cross Platform. A native platform develops apps which are specifically for that particular OS and technology and hence the look and feel remains loyal to the particular technology. Other ways round, comes a though which talks about ‘write once, run anywhere’, which focuses on writing the code in such a way that irrespective of the hardware and technology, it executes with equal ease and quality. Ideally, what looks the best is a combination of the two – a platform that gives real cross platform development keeping in mind the developers need to adhere to platform specific functionality. Here comes Xamarin, which is a framework which encompasses all the varied platforms from a single codebase. Developers have the liberty to create fully native apps but writing one set of code. Increasing its usage and popularity in the IT market, Xamarin has now launched version 3 with even alluring features for the developers. Apart from Xamarin, there are other developer toolsets like Apache Cordova.

What does the latest Xamarin offer?

• Xamarin Designer for iOS
  This innovative designer encourages creation and modification of iOS 6 and 7 storyboard files and support auto layout. It is similar to Apple’s Xcode in which the developers can be in a single development environment during the entire development procedure.
• Xamarin Forms
  It is an API which allows developers UI code which is shared beween different mobile technologies like iOS, Android and Windows Phone.
• NuGet
  It is a package management system for .NET which simplifies integration of 3rd party libraries with the mobile apps.
• Shared Projects
  Shared Projects was introduced by VS 2013 for sharing code across cross platform developers and then Xamarin developers can use these projects for code sharing across the mobile stalwarts.
• PCL
  Portable Class Libraries consists of run time libraries which can be utilized with a series of .NET runtimes like Xamarin.iOS, Xamarin.Android, Silverlight etc.
• F# support
  Xamarin Studio uses the F# programming language for building in support for iOS and Android apps.

We at SPEC INDIA, have been gaining expertise in varied mobile technologies, one of them primarily being Cross Platform. Cross Platform App Development is an arena wherein we have mastered various technologies and tools like PhoneGap, HTML5, CSS3, Java Script, Apache Cordova, Xamarin etc.