James Montemagno

In the recent release of Xamarin.Essentials (1.1.0) we introduced several new stable features including detect shake, browser customization, and a plethora of platform helpers. The team has also been working hard on one of the top requested features, which is around files. So to get feedback from developers we snuck in a few preview features into 1.1.0 including the ability to share a file or add a file as an email attachment! It is extremely easy to get started using these new preview features with just a few lines of code.

Introducing Xamarin.Essentials 1.1.0! Xamarin.Essentials’ built-in Accelerometer API now gives you ability to detect shake movement, Geolocation API detects mock locations, and the Browser API now supports more customization.

Introducing the Xamarin Customer Showcase highlighting the amazing work that developers around the world use Xamarin to build beautiful native mobile apps with .NET.

Debugging your ASP.NET Core Web API backend against you Android emulator should be simple, and with this quick tip you can use Xamarin.Essentials and Kestral to enable local debugging.

An essential part of any mobile application is the ability to persist data. Sometimes that is a large amount of data that requires a database, but often it is smaller pieces of data such as settings and preferences that need to be persisted between application launches. This is where Xamarin.Essentials can help out with its wide range of cross-platform APIs for mobile apps.

As a mobile app developer, it's great to be able to pull data from the server to our apps to provide users with a delightful experience. Of course, until your user puts their device on airplane mode or hits a rough patch with no cell reception. To provide the best user experience we need access to the current network state of our users' device. Better yet, be able to register for changes to that network state. Doing this will allow our mobile apps to react to different network conditions to provide users with instant feedback. With the connectivity API in Xamarin.Essentials, we can do just that with a few lines of code.

As the .NET community expands so should the community standups, which is why we are pleased to introduce the expansion of their community standups that we officially call the “.NET Community Standup” series. These community standups span multiple teams and products in the world of .NET and show off the amazing work the community is doing.

Every mobile application requires access to native functionality. When developing native mobile apps with Xamarin, developers are able to integrate deeply into iOS and Android since Xamarin exposes every API directly in C# to access these features. To help streamline and simplify development when needing to add native features to apps we are pleased to introduce Xamarin.Essentials, a new library that abstracts these native APIs into a set of cross-platform APIs. This means that you now have access to over 30 native features from single APIs that can be called directly from your shared business logic.

Have you been clamoring to get started with mobile development using C# and Xamarin? What if you could attend a full day workshop from the comfort of your house or in a conference room with some co-workers? Well we have you covered with our first ever full day live stream interactive workshop on Twitch!

Each week on The Xamarin Show we explore the latest and greatest in Xamarin development by looking at new features built into Visual Studio, build native cross-platform user interfaces with Xamarin.Forms, and access to native APIs with Xamarin.Essentials. I am also joined by Xamarin experts that show off the awesome beautiful libraries and applications they are building with Xamarin. No matter what type of development you are into there is surely something for you over on The Xamarin Show. This week, I wanted to feature a few "Snack Pack" episodes that show off an awesome feature in under 10 minutes!