Introducing the Xamarin Forums

We are really proud of the diverse community that is forming around Xamarin and mobile C# development. When members of our community come together at drinkups and other events, we see a ton of really positive energy and great discussion. We wanted to find a way to bring that atmosphere of creative interchange to even more people.

The seemingly obvious solution is to launch a perpetual drinkup, sort of like the multi-generational flying party in the Douglas Adams novel Life, the Universe, and Everything. But an eternal party wouldn’t leave much time to write great apps, so we had to come up with another solution. We’re really thrilled to announce the launch of the Xamarin Forums, a space on the Xamarin website that is uniquely yours.

You can use the new forums to give us feedback, demo your projects, share cool tips and tricks, talk about the latest announcements, and discuss other relevant technical and community topics. Think of it as a perpetual meetup in the cloud, a place where you can kick back and rock out with other members of the Xamarin community.

We’re using the excellent forum system from the folks at Vanilla Forums. It offers some great features, including in-site and email-based notifications of new posts and threads, a global activity feed, a badge system (à la Foursquare), and support for real-time private messaging. It’s cooler than a barrel of code monkeys, and we’re inviting you all to join today. You can sign in with your Xamarin account – the same one that you use on the Xamarin store. If you don’t have an account yet, you can register one here.

The forum has top-level categories dedicated to iOS, Android, cross-platform development, and events. There is also a general category for announcements and miscellaneous discussions. After you join the party, be sure to check out Nat’s forum kickoff thread. You can also tell us a bit about yourself in the introductions thread. As you can see, many members of the Xamarin team are already there.

Feel free to start your own thread in any relevant section. We’re looking forward to seeing some great conversations. We also plan to use the forum as a way to facilitate discussion on the topics we raise on our blog. You’ll soon start to see forum discussion thread links in many of our blog posts, much like the link below. We welcome any suggestions that you have for improving the forums and making them a more effective communication tool for our community.

Discuss this Blog Post in the Xamarin Forums