Xamarin.Essentials welcomes tvOS, watchOS, and Tizen
James Montemagno
This week marked the launch of Xamarin.Essentials 1.2 packed full of new enhancements and optimizations. The main highlight is the new file preview features enabling you to send, view, and email files from a single cross-platform API. We are actively seeking feedback on these features. So be sure to chat with the team on Gitter or leave an issue on GitHub.
Hello Apple Watch & Apple TV
Xamarin.Essentials started with a core focus on the iOS, Android, and UWP platforms to simplify cross-platform development. It offers over 50 native features from a single API that you can access from your platform or shared code. We heard from several developers in the community that they were shipping Apple Watch and TV applications and would love to use Xamarin.Essentials in those projects.
It was a tough decision as these platforms don’t offer the same API surface of the other platforms. Based on your feedback we pushed forward to solve this dilemma. We pleased to announce that starting with Xamarin.Essentials 1.3-preview watchOS and tvOS are officially supported platforms with a limited API surface. The team has implemented as many features on these platforms as they could including preferences, secure storage, sensors, and many more. You can find a full outline of what is supported on the Xamarin.Essentials platform support page.
Introducing Tizen for Xamarin.Essentials
What is better than using Xamarin.Essentials in two more platforms? How about three more platforms! That is right, we have worked closely with the Tizen team at Samsung to bring Tizen support to Xamarin.Essentials. If you don’t know what Tizen is, then you are in for a treat as it is cross-platform operating system from Samsung that runs on phones, watches, and televisions. Tizen is powered .NET Core for their runtime and Xamarin.Forms for the user interface, which means you can share code between Tizen and all of your .NET applications. Now, you can leverage Xamarin.Essentials with official support from the Samsung team. We are excited about this collaboration and future work together between the teams.
You can learn more about developing apps with .NET for Tizen on the Tizen Developer Portal. Additionally, the Tizen team has open source samples on GitHub for using Xamarin.Essentials with sensors and text-to-speech.
Install and Get Started Today
You can get started with Xamarin.Essentials by following the quick getting started guide or update to the latest preview release that is available on NuGet today.
Light
Dark
5 comments
Its is nice update! One thing I just want ask is that there is flying news that Xamrin Developers find no sufficient help from the internet because most of the software developers don’t use this technology. I mean no support on Stack-over-flow like the support for C#, ASP or even javascript. I am asking this quesion as I am going to start building new app with Xamarin, and I am scared of the reality that no support or help is found then I might stuck on the way? Could you please say some words on that!
I’ve been working with Xamarin for over a year, I work alone, and I’ve been getting by with what I can Google. In some cases I have struggled a bit and been perplexed, but I’ve always figured it out. On one item early on I actually asked for help on one of the peer help sites and got responses.
Xamarin is great technolygy and it has plenty of recourses. You could find in almost any case. Even more you could use many things from android example codes since API is almost the same. Of course if you gonna build extra large aplication with many local api then it could take time to find solution. My reccomendation just go. Combining blazor, asp core and xamarin is incredibly easy.
When you say:
“The main highlight is the new file preview features enabling you to send, view, and email files from a single cross-platform API.”
What feature do you have that allows for file previewing? I’d love to be able to preview office documents and PDF’s in the app but I’m not aware of a way to do that? Thanks.
Can’t wait to see some support for macOS and WPF too!