Recapping Xamarin Developer Summit
The first-ever Xamarin Developer Summit has come to a close. The Xamarin team had an action-packed two days of announcements, talks, and hanging out with our community in Houston! Here is a recap of some of the most important pieces you may have missed if you weren’t able to join in person or watch through the live streams.
What is Xamarin Developer Summit?
Xamarin Developer Summit (#XamDevSummit) is a conference focused on Xamarin mobile app development. It was started, organized, and executed entirely by our amazing community. There were two days packed with sessions, workshops, and visiting product “lounges” – a new take on conference exhibition booths. Hundreds of Xamarin developers came together to discuss the latest and greatest features, tools, and strategies for Xamarin development.
Keynote Announcements
Xamarin Developer Summit started off strong with the Thursday morning keynote. Filled with announcements across our SDKs, tools, and more. First, James Montemagno covered everything we’re doing to keep up with our proud tradition of having 100% native functionality. Next, David Ortinau shared the innovations we’re working on to make it easy to create 100% cross-platform .NET mobile apps using Xamarin.Forms. Finally, I walked through improvements in our tooling to make you more productive while developing Xamarin apps. For day two’s keynote, Donovan Brown taught everyone how you can use Azure DevOps and App Center to prevent outages for your customers and make mobile app development better for your developers.
100% Native and Optimized
- iOS 13 support for Xamarin is available in preview today.
- Android Q support will be available in Visual Studio 2019 16.3. Stay up-to-date with the current Visual Studio versions with the Release Notes.
- Android App Bundle support is coming to Xamarin in Visual Studio 2019 16.3. Use it to reduce app size up to 50%.
- Startup Tracing for Android is coming in the next release of Visual Studio 2019 (16.2). It can make app startup up to 50% faster.
- An automatic AndroidX migration tool is coming in a later release of Visual Studio.
Cross-Platform Everything
- Xamarin.Essentials is getting support for watchOS, tvOS, and Tizen, available now in the version1.3 pre-update. Read more on the Xamarin blog!
- Xamarin.Forms Shell and Visual are both amazing new features of Xamarin.Forms – check out some blog posts for Shell and Visual to learn more.
- CarouselView and CollectionView make it easier and more performant to scroll through lists of objects and are included in preview in Xamarin.Forms 4.1. And, 4.1 includes a checkbox control!
Developer Productivity
- A new, native, fast C# editor is available today in Visual Studio 2019 for Mac, using the same under-the-hood engine as the one you use on Windows. Learn more on the Visual Studio for Mac blog.
- A new XAML editor with the same XAML language service from Windows is in preview today in Visual Studio 2019 for Mac. Read more on the Xamarin blog.
- XML will be a fully supported file extension for Android XML files in the next release of Visual Studio.
- Visual Studio 2019 automatically manages your Android SDKs. Read more about its latest update on the Xamarin blog.
Special Mention: XAML Hot Reload for Xamarin.Forms
At Xamarin Developer Summit, we announced XAML Hot Reload for Xamarin.Forms. It’s an exciting new tool that lets you save your XAML file and see it immediately updated in your running app! It’s now in private preview and will be coming soon to Visual Studio! Read the blog post to learn more and be sure to sign up for a chance to join the private preview.
1/8/2020: XAML Hot Reload is now stable in both Visual Studio and Visual Studio for Mac! Learn more about it in our documentation.
Mobile DevOps with Xamarin, App Center and Azure DevOps
- There’s a new free tier for App Center and Azure AD support for Xamarin apps!
Listening to Our Community
The Xamarin team couldn’t resist getting feedback on our announcements, direction, and roadmap from all of the Xamarin Developer Summit attendees. Every attendee was given a Xamarin-themed poker chip and asked to vote for a potential future Xamarin.Forms feature. Once they voted, they filled out a survey in exchange for Xamarin swag. Nearly all of the attendees participated, and Faster App Startup is the winning feature!
Additionally, many Xamarin PMs, Cloud Developer Advocates, and engineers were at the conference. They took this opportunity to chat with community members, sharing advice, and giving talks of their own.
Videos on Demand
Each day of the conference we hosted a full live stream of the Microsoft track at the conference that thousands of developers tuned in for. You can watch all talks by Microsoft employees on the Xamarin Developers YouTube Channel.
A great place to start is with the main keynote: A Glimpse Into the Future of Xamarin:
Thank You!
The first Xamarin Developer Summit was a huge success. It was so inspiring to be around such passionate people. Our to-do lists are growing with all of the feedback we got from you all this week! Thank you to everyone involved with planning and executing this outstanding conference. Especially Dan Siegel from AvantiPoint and Claudio Sanchez from Megsoft, who spearheaded the event. See you next year!
Links
Presentation Slideshows on the Xamarin Developer Summit GitHub
#XamDevSummit on Twitter
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