I spent yesterday afternoon in London with a few hundred .NET developers at this Visual Studio/Xamarin event along with;

• Giles Davies from the UK Visual Studio team
• Steve Hall and Dave Hathaway and from Xamarin

The Xamarin guys were there to provide an overview of their platform, tooling, services which they did a really good job of and my aim was to talk about where Visual Studio and .NET has got to in terms of sharing code across Windows/Phone while including how that can be further extended to include Android/iOS platforms (I mainly talk about Android in these situations as to do the iOS part requires setting up a Mac).

I did a little code demo to try and show some things in Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 around portable class libraries and shared projects and I thought I’d screen capture that little demo here as below;

In that demo, I’m using the “shared project reference” manager which you can grab from here;

http://bit.ly/sharedprojectrefmanager

and I’m being a bit relaxed in terms of how things are done here, it’s just a demo and so I haven’t written a bunch of view models, view model locators or used a bunch of IoC containers and so on as I needed to fit things into a short 40-45 minute session.

I also learned something new about the “shared project reference” manager after making the video so I’ll write a separate blog post around that.

I will also try and follow up with another video post which makes more of the code that I started with sharable across Windows/Android and I might try and look at making the tiny bit of UI that I’ve got sharable too.

Update 1 – Slides

Just a quick update to add a link to the slides that I showed on the day at the event. I only showed the first 4 slides of this PowerPoint but I originally made some additional slides which are also present here so if you came along on the day and are puzzling over why you didn’t see them before that’s because I didn’t use them.

http://1drv.ms/1iMIUCw

Enjoy.

Update 2 – Learning How to add a Shared Project

In that original video there’s a piece where I added a new shared project by getting rid of an existing phone project and then adding a whole new two “Phone + Shared” projects. This felt weird to me at the time but I didn’t know of a better way of doing it.

So…I asked on Twitter and I received

and that’s exactly what I wanted to know but hadn’t been able to spot and so I went and made another little insert to the first video where I show that;

and that improves things quite a bit over the first iteration here