This past Saturday, Syncfusion hosted its second Xamarin Dev Days this year. This time, the event was held in the city of Chennai in Tamil Nadu, India.
The event provided attendees with an intense, hands-on learning experience for exploring mobile development. It started with an introduction to Xamarin by Nish Anil of Microsoft. Sessions on Xamarin.Forms and Xamarin and Azure were given by Harikrishnan Natarajan and Prabhakaran Ramasamy of Syncfusion.
Anil explained how creating a great connected experience across multiple platforms is an essential element of great mobile applications. He shared the history of Xamarin and Mono, and how all their awesome products are now integrated since Microsoft’s acquisition.
He talked about the importance of testing mobile apps and the challenges developers incur with device fragmentation. He explained the Xamarin Test Cloud and gave insights on VSTS and HockeyApp. He stressed that “there’s no better time to be a .NET developer” because now with C# and .NET skills you can target 2.6 billion devices.
Apps today require a backend and excellent connectivity for a superb experience. However, what happens when there is little to no connectivity—such as on an airplane or in some foreign countries? What does it take for mobile apps to synchronize data when the device gets back online effortlessly?
Although users expect and deserve this type of behavior, maintaining the cloud backend and APIs are time-consuming and error-prone. To address this need, Anil focused on Azure App Service, which is a PAAS offering from Azure. Azure offers a powerful client-side SDK for Xamarin that supports offline syncing, push notifications, authentication, and database connections.
Later that day, Anil answered audience questions and demoed, step by step, how to create a “no code” backend using Easy Tables on Azure App Service Mobile Apps by creating a sample that instantly connects to the cloud.
Audience members reported that they gained a great deal of knowledge from the sessions.
“The event was extremely well organized,” said one attendee. “Thanks to Syncfusion for all the arrangements. Thanks also to Nish Anil from Xamarin for his informative talk and excellent hands-on workshop in the afternoon.”
For more information about Xamarin, visit www.xamarin.com. Details about Syncfusion’s suite of Xamarin controls can be found on the Essential Studio for Xamarin webpage.