Digging into Xamarin Forms with Laurent Bugnion
Carl and Richard talk to Laurent Bugnion about Xamarin Forms. Now that the forms capability has been out for a few months, Laurent digs into the strengths and weaknesses of the approach. The goal of Xamarin forms is to simplify cross-platform mobile development between iOS, Android and Windows Phone. Has it delivered? Laurent focuses in on building one project, but different builds with different bits of code for each device. You can't have one code base run everywhere, nor do you want to - there's still a need for tailoring for each device, but Xamarin Forms makes that smaller and simpler.
Guests:
Laurent Bugnion
Laurent works as Senior Cloud Developer Advocate for Microsoft after almost 10 years spent working for IdentityMine and Valorem, two leading firms in Microsoft technologies. He is one of the foremost experts for XAML and C# based development. He codes in Windows, WPF, Xamarin (iOS and Android), Unity, ASP.NET. On his free time, Laurent writes for technical publications such as MSDN Magazine, and his blog is on blog.galasoft.ch. He is a frequent speaker at conferences such as Microsoft MIX, Build, TechEd, VSLive, TechDays and many other international events. Prior to joining Microsoft, Laurent was a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for Windows development from 2007 to 2017, a Microsoft Regional Director from 2013 and a Xamarin Most Valuable Professional from 2015. He is also the author of the well-known open source framework MVVM Light for Windows, WPF, Xamarin, and of the popular Pluralsight reference course about MVVM Light.
Links:
- Five Programming Languages Marked for Death http://news.dice.com/2014/10/09/5-programming-languages-marked-for-death/
- Xamarin Forms http://xamarin.com/forms
- Carl's Blog Post on Xamarin Development with Mac http://carlfranklin.net/blog/2014/9/17/macbook-pro-parallels-windows-81-visual-studio-xamarin-aweso.html
- MVVM Light https://mvvmlight.codeplex.com/
- MVVM Cross https://github.com/MvvmCross/MvvmCross
- Caliburn.Micro https://github.com/Caliburn-Micro/Caliburn.Micro
- Laurent's Pluralsight Course on MVVM Light http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/mvvm-light-toolkit-fundamentals