Building native mobile apps for Windows, iOS and Android while staying DRY

This session was co-presented with Marcel de Vries at the XebiCon 2015 conference in Amsterdam.

When building mobile applications today for the mainstream mobile operating systems, you have two primary options: either build your app with HTML5 + JavaScript and package that up as a cross platform app, or take the native route and build the app with native tools provided by the platform vendors. This usually means a trading off a compromised user experience versus spending a lot of time building the same app multiple times. Are you still repeating yourself because you want to deliver high quality native apps? In this session we will show you that it is possible to build high quality native apps using cross platform C# with Xamarin and teach you techniques for optimal code reuse. 3 apps for the price of 1½!

Transcript

1. Building native Marcel de Vries & Roy Cornelissen
2. mdevries@xpirit.com @marcelv http://fluentbytes.com Xpirit Also regional director
5. Don’t yourself
6. Vendor Hybrid DRY App logic
7. really mean?
8. Best performance
9. App logic Use a shared language DRY App logic C#
10. Xamarin For iOS and Android DRY App logic
11. Visual Studio For Windows DRY App logic
13. Xamarin.iOS does full Ahead Of Time (AOT) compilation to produce an ARM binary suitable for Apple’s App Store. Xamarin.Android takes advantage of Just In Time (JIT) compilation on the Android device and runs in the Mono runtime.
15. magic trick Language projections for Objective-C and Java
16. magic trick Cocoa Touch API’s C# bindings C# friendly projections
17. magic trick Linux Kernel Mono ART Android.* Java.* .NET API Android bindings ACW MCW
19. Goal Raise the level of code reuse even further… Shared app logic
20. Shared UI …by abstracting common UI paradigms into a library Goal Shared app logic
22. Page abstractions
23. Layout abstractions
24. tinyurl.com/xamarin-forms
25. tinyurl.com/xamarin-forms
26. tinyurl.com/xamarin-forms
27. UILabel TextView LabelRenderer LabelRenderer LabelRenderer Label TextBlock
28. MyEntry Entry MyEntryRenderer_Windows MyEntryRenderer_Android MyEntryRenderer_iOS Xamarin.Platform Windows.EntryRenderer Xamarin.Platform Android.EntryRenderer Xamarin.Platform iOS.EntryRenderer Platform specific Shared code
30. Reusable 34% Shared Logic 17% Android 10% iOS 8% Windows Phone 10% Services 21% Shared 84% Specific 16% Per App
31. Native Apps
32. @roycornelissen roycornelissen.wordpress.com rcornelissen@xpirit.com @marcelv fluentbytes.com mdevries@xpirit.com Thank you!
33. @roycornelissen roycornelissen.wordpress.com rcornelissen@xpirit.com bit.ly/XpiritMagazine @marcelv fluentbytes.com mdevries@xpirit.com