Beginning With Xamarin

I’m a little late to the mobile game…like 9 years late, but I really haven’t been motivated to create anything for the mobile space. I have daydreamed about creating a fantastic mobile app for the iPhone and Android and it has remained just that, a daydream. When I put in after hours time, for hobby projects or training, it generally needs to be directly tied to my short to medium term career goals.

Now, I finally have an opportunity to create a mobile app at work.

This is exciting and I’m really looking forward to the journey!

The Microsoft kool-aid tastes good to me, I love Visual Studio, C#, the .NET Framework. At this point, I don’t really know much else (besides the obligatory javascript, which fosters much more of a love-hate relationship). Based on this, I have selected Xamarin as my development tool without doing much research.

I decided to start this blog as a structured brain-dump. Generally, I make notes in Onenote and it stays hidden from the universe, this time I want to try something different.

Here we are at ground 0, sprint 0, whatever you want to call it. I’m ramping up on Xamarin, starting with 3 Pluralsight courses:

  1. Building Cross-Platform iOS/Android Apps with Xamarin, Visual Studio, and C# – Part 1
  2. Building Cross-Platform iOS/Android Apps with Xamarin, Visual Studio and C# – Part 2
  3. Introduction to Xamarin.Forms

I don’t have a Mac, and I don’t wish to have one or deal with one, so I’m going to be using Visual Studio Online (TFS 2015) and the built in Xamarin build capabilities to build my iOS app (see Brian Harry’s post).

I will be back tomorrow with more.