Chapter 1. Introducing native cross-platform applications with Xamarin
This chapter covers
- What a Xamarin app is
- The mobile-optimized development lifecycle
- Building production-ready cross-platform apps
Back in 2000 Microsoft announced a new software framework called .NET, along with a new programming language called C#. Not long after this, a company called Ximian (founded by Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman) started working on Mono, a free implementation of the .NET framework and the C# compiler that could run on Linux.
Fast forward 16 years, and Nat Friedman is standing on stage at the Xamarin Evolve conference giving the keynote talk—physically in front of sixteen hundred mobile developers and virtually in front of tens of thousands more. He’s speaking about how Xamarin enables a mobile-optimized development lifecycle. Xamarin (the company that grew out of the ashes of Ximian and that provides tools and technology to build cross-platform mobile apps) had just been bought by Microsoft for a rumored half a billion U.S. dollars, and had become a key part of Microsoft’s “mobile first, cloud first” strategy.
Xamarin is now a well-known term among the mobile developer community, and it’s starting to be well known in other Microsoft-based developer circles. But what do we mean when we talk about Xamarin mobile apps, and what does Xamarin give us above and beyond other tools?