What is Xamarin? An incredible C# technology
What is Xamarin? What is its use? Who is its competitor? Do you need C# training to work with Xamarin?
Join us to know the answers to all the questions.
What We Cover :
- Introducing Xamarin
- Xamorn’s competitor
- Facts about Xamarin
- Xamarin Advantages and Disadvantages
What is Xamarin?
Xamarin is a software company that produces commercial software development tools. The company was founded in 2011 in California by the Mono Android open source project.
Xamarin’s goal was to write programs for three platforms: Android, iPhone and Windows Phone, using the C # Sharp programming language. Finally, in early 2016, Xamarin was acquired by Microsoft, and this was the beginning of a new beginning for Xamarin and Microsoft, which, thanks to new Microsoft policies and a new strategy of cloud first and mobile first, is a great opportunity for Xamarin and It was his products. So with the Mono open source project, they provided a platform that could build applications such as iOS, OS x, and Android using C # and .Net. Launched xamarin.Android product for Android.
Xamarin cross-platform
As we said in the introduction of Xamarin programming language, this language is a tool that is used to design and build software that can be used on all mobile phones under different operating systems; This means that when you create an application using C-sharp language in Xamarin space, you no longer need to change or rewrite it (for example, in Java language, etc.) to use it on other platforms. In fact, we can say that this language is a multi-platform programming tool.
You may be wondering what a cross-platform program is called?
Multi-platform software is software programming that can be run on multiple platforms and is divided into two categories :
The first category: programs that the programmer writes once and the compiler itself produces a separate version for each operating system.
The second category: are programs that are written in interpreted languages and can be run by interpreters on any platform. Interpreter programming languages are those languages that require an interpreter to use, such as html or js.
So what are the benefits of developing multi-platform mobile apps ?
- Reuse the codes
- Rapid development
- Easy to implement
- Ideal for prototyping
Xamorn’s competitor
The language competing with Xamarin is Java. This language is very popular among programmers for the production of mobile applications and can be said to be a strong competitor for Xamarin; Although the power of the Java language can not be denied.
In the field of mobile programming, Java and several of its tools are used for Android, or for the programming on iOS, the objective C language and its tools are used, but Xamarin allows you to use the C-Sharp language for all 3 mobile platforms. That said, a program with only one environment and one common language.
Facts from Xamarin
- One of the most efficient platforms used to build applications with different operating systems. Instead of designing separately for each system, you can share approximately 75 to 90 percent of the code developed across all major mobile operating systems. However, design costs and market entry time are reduced.
- Offers excellent UX.
- Ensures integrity, quality and performance testing on a wide range of devices.
Learn more from Xamarin
- Because Xamarin is multi-platform, you can easily extend the changes to the source file. That means easier maintenance
- Mac and Windows developers use Xamarin to build iOS Apple Watch apps, which means the technology supports smartwatch apps.
- Did you know that Xamarin is not limited to mobile application development and you can develop applications such as: Wearable, Mac, TvOs and OpenGL games and SceneKit / SpriteKit / Metal.
- Writing multiple codes at the same time is not valuable for building native applications on different operating systems, and by using Xamarin we can reduce the time and cost that we can use the same base code (70 to 80% of the code) to create native mobile applications again.
What famous companies use Xamarin?
- Cognizant
- Bosch
- Siemens
- LEAP
- 3M
- Slack
Benefits of Xamarin
- Ability to transfer code between applications built using Xamarin regardless of the platform structure in which it is located.
- Xamarin is the only framework that takes the feature of the native applications of any platform well in any platform format.
- Native appnative app: These are applications that are built in a software environment specific to a particular platform. For example, to use an application in the Android platform, design an application in Android studio.
- Ability to build applications (IOS – Android – Windows phone) with the ability to transfer the same code (up to about 96%)
- Allows you to reuse the code while reducing the number of projects, which means it has portable class libraries.
- Ability to add components including charts, tables, beautiful views, [UI controls] and directly from .IDE
- With Xamarin template, the design interface of all three platforms will be shared with the basic [XAML] framework.
Disadvantages of Xamarin
After talking about the advantages of Xamarin, we have listed some of its problems and disadvantages in the following section:
Having a license:
Xamarin.Android Like Xamarin.IOS and Xamarin.OS x are commercial tools and should be purchased. Of course, this problem is not acute in our country.
Waiting for an update:
In most cases, when a version of Android is released, it takes time for Xamarin to update its software to be compatible with the latest version of Android.
Performance and memory management:
It is sometimes said that using the C # language to develop Android applications slows down, but this has not yet been properly measured and evaluated.
How does Xamarin work?
The most commonly asked question is how does Xamarin work? Is it possible to develop applications for all platforms using one code?
Yes, Xamarin allows the programmer to do this.
By converting Android and IOs SDKs to C #, it has the ability to access all Android and IOs APIs. By converting these SDKs to C # Xamarin has facilitated the development of mobile applications, and by integrating all SDKs, has facilitated development using a convenient, powerful and all-encompassing language.
What is the design of applications (UI) in Xamarin?
Xamarin UI can be designed like any other language. You need to create a different UI for each platform and connect it to Codebase. There are two ways to design an application UI:
- Using the main Native methods
- Use Xamarin.Form
Note : Using Xamarin Form allows you to create a UI only once.
General evaluation of xamarin according to the following
We learned that Xamarin is a flexible platform that incredibly compiles C # code across various mobile operating systems. So it provides everything a programmer needs to build a professional app.
Microsoft, which at the time owned Xamarin, promised its users that in the not-too-distant future, with many updates, it would fix all of Xamarin’s bugs and problems, and increase the power of this cross-platform tool.
When comparing Xamarin with other programming tools, special attention should be paid to increase its quality from the time Microsoft acquired full ownership of Xamarin (February 24, 2016) until today. Considering the reduction of many common [Errors] in Xamarin during this period and solving the problem of developers’ unfamiliarity with [Errors], which is undoubtedly one of the disadvantages of any startup tool, a bright future can be imagined for Xamarin.
Xamarin has made great strides, and large companies such as Olo food, CA mobile: and other banks have contracted with Microsoft with more than 30 million users to build high-security apps to improve their e-commerce.
Of course, it is also necessary to mention that with Xamarin being in the [Visual studio] environment, its popularity in teamwork has increased dramatically. Furthermore, both as a project manager and as a developer, in source control, which is one of the problems of working in [Native] and [Android Studio] environments, Xamarin has been able to be more superior than work tools. Create in [Native] environment. As you know, every time a team member wants to check a [Reference], all team members have to spend a lot of time fixing [Errors].
Conclusion
Xamarin is one of the top multi-platform application development tools in the world for which there is a good job market today. If you are planning to start developing mobile applications, Xamarin will definitely be one of the best choices for you.
Because using Xamarin technology and just learning C #, you can code for all operating systems and you no longer need to learn different ways. For the ability of this technology, we can say that using this language, you can run C # code on 2.6 billion devices.