Sunday, June 15, 2014

Behold... Xamarin 3 and Xamarin.Forms

amarin did it again.... This time with the release of Xamarin 3, my dream has come true. Xamarin 3, among other things has released a cool technology from their side called Xamarin.Forms

From my understanding, Xamarin.Forms is about a common set of API/Controls for developers to create great UI experience that can target different sets of platforms. Previously that wasn't the case. Xamarin concentrated on their Mono technology which is an implementation of .NET from Microsoft, but lives in the open source space. Xamarin did try to develop something similar to Silverlight which they called it Moonlight running on Linux. But for some reasons they abandoned it. 


During their course of bringing up new technology features to developers, Xamarin connected different mobile platforms by the means of having a single code base for business logics and data access layer logics using Microsoft's C# language - but never the user interface. When Microsoft introduced Portal Class Library (PCL), they quickly embraced it, and hence, having a common set of API's that sits inside PCL and can be used by many different platforms such as Android, IOS and even Windows Phone. 


This is great news for developers. Especially those who love C# as their favourite programming language. Having to to have a common user interface technology to target different platforms, I guess it's a winner for all developers alike. However, with these great technology advancements on the Xamarin side, comes a cost. Xamarin.Forms does not come in their Starter edition. (see here for details). If you are an indie developer, the best package for you would be the Indie edition which cost around USD299.00. Bummer! A serious developer would certainly sign up for the subscription, but what if you are a developer like me who wishes to find out what the technology can offer before deciding?

To the guys at Xamarin, hopefully you could give us developers some ways to try your out your cool technology... :)