Contributing to Xamarin.Android

Jon Douglas

Xamarin has been open source for over two years now, starting the day we made the exciting announcement about the future of Xamarin. Since then, we’ve moved the majority of our work out in the open so that you and your fellow developers can contribute.

Open source is a fantastic place for developers to learn the internal workings of a framework, report issues that they are encountering, and interact with project maintainers. It can, however, be a bit overwhelming to know where and how to start contributing to a large project, such as Xamarin.Android.

Ways to Contribute

Report Issues

One easy way to contribute to an open source repository is to bring up an issue by writing a great bug report. Not only does this help project maintainers, but your community members will thank you when they encounter the same problem(s).

Vote on Existing Issues

To give project maintainers more visibility into what issues should be prioritized, a simple upvote or downvote on an existing issue helps provide a count of users who are running into a problem.

Use Visual Studio Preview

Installing and using the Visual Studio Previews (Windows) or Visual Studio for Mac Previews (Mac) is another great way to provide early feedback on upcoming releases. You’ll also get to experience the latest in bug fixes, new features, and much more!

Stay on the Bleeding Edge

Android changes very quickly thanks to the exciting announcements from Google each year. We tend to have support for these new features on our master builds that you can download as a .vsix/.pkg on Jenkins. This is an excellent way to experience what the latest master builds have to offer.

Join the Community

The Xamarin SDK teams work in the open, and you can join the conversation on Gitter, which is a great place to talk with the team about the development of these SDKs.

Submit a Pull Request

Writing code is an obvious way to contribute; pull requests are welcome! If you’re looking for the best place to get started, we recommend checking for issues that are labeled good-first-issue, help wanted, or bug. Be sure to also check out the wiki for additional tips on where to contribute and coding guidelines.

We look forward to seeing you in the community and becoming part of our open source family. Thank you for helping make Xamarin and Visual Studio better!

Discuss this post on the Xamarin Forums

Jon Douglas Principal Program Manager, NuGet

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