Mobile Client

T09 Building Mobile Cross-Platform Apps with C# and Xamarin

06/16/2015

1:30pm - 2:45pm

Level: Intermediate

Nick Landry

Senior Technical Evangelist

Microsoft

Building native applications across multiple platforms is hard. iOS requires knowledge of Xcode, the iOS SDK and Objective-C. Android requires Eclipse, the Android SDK and Java. Windows 8 & Windows Phone requires Visual Studio, C# and their respective SDKs. Are we really expected to learn all of this? You can take the HTML5 & PhoneGap route, but not all apps should be built using a hybrid approach. If you want to create a truly competitive app with a premium experience, you'll need to go native.

Fortunately, there is a way you can share a lot of your code across mobile platforms and do so using the C# language you already know and love. The Mono framework is an Open Source project that brings .NET to other platforms, and Xamarin tools leverage Mono for iOS and Android development. This session explores how you can build cross-platform applications for iOS, Android, Windows Phone & Windows 8 using C#.

You'll learn how to get started with a sample cross-platform solution, which tools you can use, how to design a proper user interface for each platform and how to structure your projects for maximum code reuse. Native mobile development doesn't have to be so hard. Come learn how your .NET skills can be transformed for true cross-platform development.