Xamarin.Forms Updates - September/October 2017

I've got a new article out on Xamarin.Forms.  It is a look at some of the features that just came out as well as some features coming out in the next major release (3.0).  The 3.0 release is stated as being out in the 4th quarter, 2017, but we will see.  I never trust shipment dates.  :-)

Note: Xamarin called the next update version 2.3.5 at the time the article was written.  The version was changed to 2.4 right before the article was published and we didn't know until it was too late.

Url: https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2017/09/01/xamarinforms-updates.aspx

I have an interesting relationship with Xamarin.Forms (XF). My view of cross-platform interfaces was born back in 1993 during a hallway conversation regarding cross-platform (Windows and Mac at the time) and how an interface that looked like Windows on the Mac meant the Mac users were going to come for you with pitchforks.

I had several conversations from 2011 to 2013 with various people from Xamarin about the need for a cross-platform visual UI for mobile devices. Basically, I was hearing from customers that there was a need for a cross-platform UI API. There needed to be some type of API that developers could call for buttons, textboxes and lists that spanned iOS and Android platforms. My favorite response was: "When hell freezes over." I laughed about this because I hate cross-platform APIs that don’t look like the underlying platform. I’ve seen this several times with cross-platform UIs.

Then I was in Las Vegas in 2013 and my friend told me that "Hell has indeed frozen over." I laughed because I knew exactly what he was talking about. A few weeks later I was in San Francisco and had about three hours of discussion with Jason Smith -- the mastermind behind XF who comes from the gaming industry where performance is key -- regarding XF, how it would work, some of the underlying pieces and a bunch of things that were well over my head.

Fast forward almost four years, and I’ve seen some highs and lows with XF. It works well for things that are fairly simple. For apps that are complex, I’ve been less sold on the idea. Having to load a lot of external components to get the native device functionality into a project isn’t a formula for success, I found. I’ve been bitten by components no longer supported, components not working as advertised and my general distrust for components not part of a main product package. Add with the experience of XF running fine on iOS and horribly slow on anything but the most recent Android devices, I’d become quite concerned about the feasibility of XF. I’ve been concerned about the amount of dependence on XF as the singular cross-platform development solution with Xamarin. Thankfully, over the past year I’ve doubled down on my testing of XF. I’ve written two applications for my startup and used XF. Each application has been thoroughly tested on my 2-year-old Android phone. These apps seem to run well, but they’re admittedly simple and might not be a good example measurement. After all, both deal more with data, pictures and Web services than they do with a lot of UI interaction.

Enjoy, and thanks for reading.