Category Archives: Xamarin

Visual Studio 2015 Preview–Debugging a Xamarin ‘Hello world’ on the Android Emulator

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Just a quick note as I installed the Visual Studio 2015 Preview from here;

Visual Studio 2015

onto a system where I already had Visual Studio 2013 installed along with Xamarin’s cross-platform tools and it took me a couple of steps to get things up and running. I installed these features from Visual Studio 2015;

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and when the installer ran, rebooted and then launched up the “secondary installer” for x-platform development I installed the list below which was the default set;

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and that all seemed to work out with 2 exceptions which were.

Missing Xamarin Projects? Upgrade Xamarin to 3.9

I’m not 100% sure whether this is right or not but I found that when I’d come out of the installation I didn’t see any Xamarin project types inside of Visual Studio which I seemed to get resolved by upgrading my Xamarin installation to 3.9 as per;

Xamarin 3.9

and that seemed to add the VS2015 support (just like the web page says Smile).

Xamarin Apps Don’t Launch on the VS Emulator?

The other snag I hit was that when I ran apps onto the VS Android Emulator I found that the app seemed to start and then immediately exit. It sounded a little bit like this problem;

Xamarin App Does Not Run on Android Emulator

and it does seem to be the case that if I enable this “Fast Deployment” option then the app doesn’t seem to run properly whereas if I disable it then it seems to work ‘better’ and I can set breakpoints and so on;

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Just sharing in case this helps anyone else…

UK Future Decoded Event Video: Mike Taulty on Native C# Apps for Microsoft Devices

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Microsoft UK recently ran the UK Future Decoded Event where I was the owner of a half-day track of sessions on Visual Studio for Cross Platform Applications. I described that track as;

There’s a tension between an app developer who wants to get the most from their investment in skills and tools and a device/platform vendor who wants to make sure that apps are really shiny on their devices.

What’s a dev to do? Build native for iOS/Android/Windows and take the hit on multiple code-bases? Go lowest, common denominator and build hybrid? Or…is there another way? Join us for an afternoon of getting bang up to date on how Visual Studio works with Xamarin and Cordova to get your code across as many devices as possible without compromising the user or developer experience.

The second session of the day was presented by me and was entitled “Visual Studio & Windows/Phone: Native C# Apps on Microsoft devices” and the video is now available for you to watch below.

In short, the session is intended to cover off a few areas;

  • A brief scene setting around cross platform C# code writing across iOS/Android/Windows/Phone
  • Where Windows/Phone have got to with the 8.1 release and the converged platform for “Universal” apps
  • An explanation of what shared projects are in Visual Studio, how the tooling works with them and how we can code shared/exclusive code for multiple platforms this way
  • A demo of building a simple Windows/Phone “app” with a lot of shared pieces.
  • A demo of looking at how shared projects and portable class libraries can allow us to share/exclude cross-platform code across Android/Windows/Phone/iOS.

Most of the session is demo (I’d guess around 45 of the 60 minutes is in Visual Studio).

Enjoy!

UK Future Decoded Event Video: Stuart Lodge on Visual Studio and Xamarin

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Microsoft UK recently ran the UK Future Decoded Event where I was the owner of a half-day track of sessions on Visual Studio for Cross Platform Applications. I described that track as;

There’s a tension between an app developer who wants to get the most from their investment in skills and tools and a device/platform vendor who wants to make sure that apps are really shiny on their devices.

What’s a dev to do? Build native for iOS/Android/Windows and take the hit on multiple code-bases? Go lowest, common denominator and build hybrid? Or…is there another way? Join us for an afternoon of getting bang up to date on how Visual Studio works with Xamarin and Cordova to get your code across as many devices as possible without compromising the user or developer experience.

The first session of the day was Stuart Lodge of Cirrious who’s also the creator of the MvvmCross framework for cross platform apps.

Stuart delivered a great session entitled “Visual Studio & Xamarin: Native C# Apps on iOS & Android devices” and the video is now available for you to watch below;

Enjoy!