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 byNish Anil of Microsoft. Sessions
on Xamarin.Forms and Xamarin and Azure were given
by Harikrishnan Natarajan and Prabhakaran Ramasamy
of Syncfusion.
Nish Anil
Presenting at Xamarin Dev Days
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.
Xamarin Dev Days
Attendees
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.