Part 1. Getting started with Xamarin

The traditional way to build a mobile app is to write it twice: once in Objective-C or Swift for iOS, and then again in Java for Android. This is a huge waste of time, duplicating code across two languages. Luckily some of the most innovative engineers in the world (according to Time magazine) have a solution—Xamarin.

Xamarin is a platform from Microsoft that allows you to build and ship iOS and Android apps using .NET. It’s also part of a thriving mobile ecosystem containing everything from mobile-specific cloud resources from Microsoft, DevOps tools, and a huge community of open source software. At its most basic, it’s a way to use the same language and technology across iOS and Android, allowing you to reuse large amounts of code and third-party libraries across two very different mobile platforms. The best practices around Xamarin are focused on keeping this amount of code-sharing as large as possible.