Xamarin Tools: Components, Components, Components!

The Xamarin tool ecosystem is gaining popularity, as more developers continue to build tools with mobility in mind. Here's how to use them in your projects. 

I couldn't help but think about Steve Ballmer's "Developers, developers, developers! …" chant. While often lampooned, the chant shows how important developers are to growing the Microsoft platform.

End-user developers and companies will often judge a company's acceptance in the marketplace by the number of third-party components and add-ins that are developed around that product. It's a complaint I've heard leveled against Xamarin, that it lacks a robust ecosystem of tools, but that is changing.

Url: http://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2014/10/01/xamarin-tools.aspx

Xamarin.Forms: What Developers Make of It

Developers tell us why they use it and what benefit they derive from the tooling, and Xamarin developer Craig Dunn goes over the decisionmaking process when choosing between Xamarin.Forms, Xamarin.iOS or Xamarin.Android.

I reached out to several developers who were involved with the Xamarin.Forms (XF) beta to get their thoughts on it and also talked with an evangelist for Xamarin, Craig Dunn to get some deeper insight into the development of the product.

Rui Marinho is a developer based in Portugal. Rui is heavily involved in an open source project called Xamarin.Forms Lab project, which is intended to provide additional functionality that can be plugged into Xamarin.Forms. You can check out his Web site at ruimarinho.net to check it out and find additional third-party/open source projects for Xamarin.Forms. Ryan Groom has been developing software for more than 20 years and has authored several books and been extremely active working with Xamarin tools. Jason Awbrey is a Xamarin MVP with nearly 20 years of experience with software development.

Article Url: http://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2014/09/01/xamarin-forms.aspx