Jumpstart Your Xamarin App Development

Xamarin is presented as a way for .NET developers to build modern cross-platform mobile apps from a single codebase while still producing native output on each platform. The article also points to tooling, open source source code, and UI components that can help speed up development.

Reading notes

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• Xamarin lets .NET developers write C#/XAML and cross-compile to native bits for each platform.
• Visual Studio and Xamarin Studio are described as the two main IDEs, both with free Community editions and common development features.
• Visual Studio on Windows needs a Mac as an iOS build host, while Xamarin Studio on Mac targets iOS and Android but not Windows.
• The article lists NuGet, Xamarin Component Store, MVVM Light, Prism for Xamarin.Forms, XUnit, Xamarin Workbooks, Xamarin Test Cloud, and prebuilt apps as useful tools.
• Xamarin frameworks and SDKs are described as open source under MIT, with source available through open.xamarin.com.
• It says developers can build Xamarin.Forms and xamarin-macios from source and use scripts to install and provision dependencies.
• The article encourages contributing back by filing bugs, joining mailing lists or chat, following coding patterns, signing the .NET Foundation CLA, and making pull requests.
• Telerik UI for Xamarin is presented as a set of native UI widgets for Xamarin apps, including charts, ListView, and SideDrawer.
• It gives three ways to get started with Telerik UI for Xamarin: NuGet package, Telerik Control Panel, or plain download.