Xamarin Blog

An open source mobile platform for building Android, iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS apps with .NET.

Accessing Native Features the Cross-Platform Way with Xamarin.Essentials

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.

November 2018 Xamarin and Azure Office Hours Recap

I ❤️ every single developer. And I want to hear your stories. I want to hear about your successes, your "not-so-much" successes, and any questions or concerns you may have about our tooling. This way I can bring all of those back to the product teams to advocate for you. I'll get the answers, inform the product teams of what's working and what's not, and together we'll influence the products and make developing even more fun - for everybody.

Connect(); 2018 Xamarin Announcements

Today, at Microsoft Connect(); 2018, we have several exciting announcements about brand new capabilities and foundational improvements in the Xamarin platform driven by your generous feedback. Visual Studio developers everywhere will enjoy updated stable releases of Xamarin with Visual Studio 2017 and Visual Studio 2017 for Mac. We are also giving you the first hands-on preview of Visual Studio 2019, along with Xamarin.Forms 4.0. Below are just a few highlights from today’s announcements:

Xamarin.Forms and Zeplin: Speed Up Your Design to Development Process

Working in a small team with frequent design changes, the extension for Zeplin helps us quickly implement the design. It is also convenient due to its ability to generate a ResourceDictionary for Xamarin.Forms with all your colors and style. Whether you are developing for web or creating mobile apps, Zeplin is a great tool that can boost your productivity by bridging the gap between design and code. Zeplin is a service available for free, but with one active project limitation.

Protect your Xamarin.Android Apps at Runtime with Dotfuscator

n a previous blog we discussed obfuscating your Xamarin application with Dotfuscator Community to protect it from reverse-engineering. That kind of protection is an important and necessary layer in your application's security posture, but it shouldn't be the only layer. The application also needs to react to threats at runtime in order to protect its own integrity, and to protect the data that it accesses.