The Xamarin Dev Day was held at Microsoft’s building near Paddington. It was a modern building, very bright and filled with light.
What Was Covered on this Xamarin Dev Day
Short presentations were made to start the day off. The presentations given were:
- Intro to Xamarin
- Cross platform Xamarin
- Cloud Xamarin (Azure)
The Hands on Lab session began after lunch where we worked through setting up a Xamarin Forms app and connecting it to an Azure mobile backend.
What Did I Learn
I learned more about Xamarin Forms and that Azure should be an option when I’m developing mobile apps, especially using Xamarin, as you can connect with it by following a step by step guide. And the Xamarin team have made a GitHub repository of example code to help just in case I forget.
Using Azure, I was able to spin up a mobile backend in minutes. And although you have to pay for the use, you only pay for what you use.
I need to look into how compatible Azure is with Unity, but it seems like a good option for a backend solution.
The best thing I think was learning about Azure. The downside of the day? Building my project seemed to take between five to ten mins at times, and that was before it got to the iOS emulator. Not sure if this was just an issue for iOS and not Android. Unfortunately, I was behind on the latest version of Android and couldn’t build an Android project.
Action Points
Before going to another one of these Dev Days, I need to:
- Make sure I update Mac OS
- Get the lastest version of Xcode to get latest iOS SDK
- Update Android Studio to get the latest Android SDKs