August 8th: Streamlined App Development with Xamarin.Essentials

Keyhole Software Community, Company News, Educational Event, Keyhole, Mobile, Xamarin Leave a Comment

The Keyhole Software team is excited to announce that we are to host and sponsor the upcoming Kansas City Mobile Developers Meetup on Thursday, August 8th. The August meetup of the educational user group will be led by Keyhole’s Mike Cerny with the topic focused on Xamarin.Essentials.

This meetup group discusses…

Getting Started with Xamarin.Forms and Azure Mobile App Service

Jeff Hopper .NET, Azure, Cloud, Development Technologies, Mobile, Tutorial, Xamarin 2 Comments

Earlier this month my friend Ryan introduced us to Getting Started with Xamarin Forms and Prism. In that post, Ryan started a mobile application to display blog posts which he called SimpleBlog.

In this article, I would like to continue that demonstration by adding a back-end server to persist and share these blogs. This will be accomplished using Azure’s Mobile App Service which falls within its free tier services.

Yes, you did read that right: you can spin up an Azure account and have access to try out many of Azure’s features. For instance, the example I am going to walk you through today can be hosted indefinitely without costing you anything, and to that, you could add nine more web, mobile, or API services. See https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/ for more information.

There is no way I am going to be able to cover all the possibilities available in an Azure Mobile App service, much less what Azure has to offer. My intent in this post is to help “whet your appetite” on the possibilities by giving a quick overview of just two great frameworks that play great together: the Microsoft.Azure.Mobile.Client mobile framework tied to an Azure Mobile Apps Service….

Getting Started with Xamarin Forms and Prism

Ryan Nguyen .NET, Development Technologies, Mobile, Xamarin 2 Comments

In this blog, I’ll show you how easy it is to create an Android and iOS application using Xamarin Forms while utilizing Prism.

What are Xamarin Forms?
Xamarin Forms is a platform that allows developers to create native Android, iOS, and Windows applications while using the beloved C# programming language. 

An attractive feature of Xamarin Forms is that it uses a shared C# codebase to create a native user interface specific to their platform. Out of the box, Xamarin provides large collections of controls to get started. It also has the ability to access native platform features, such as camera access, GPS, text to speech, etc, by using the Dependency Service.

What is Prism?
According to the Prism website, Prism is defined as “a framework for building loosely coupled, maintainable, and testable XAML applications in WPF, Windows 10 UWP, and Xamarin Forms. Prism provides an implementation of a collection of design patterns that are helpful in writing well-structured and maintainable XAML applications, including MVVM, dependency injection, commands, EventAggregator, and others.” In other words, Prism helps users to write better code…. 

PhoneGap: Utilizing Native Mobile Features with Plugins

Jinal Patel Mobile, Tutorial, Xamarin 2 Comments

Attention: The following article was published over 10 years ago, and the information provided may be aged or outdated. Please keep that in mind as you read the post.Recently, I was tasked with developing a mobile application in PhoneGap that utilized the Bluetooth feature. Although PhoneGap provides basic functionality, PhoneGap lacks the ability to implement mobile features like Bluetooth. However, …

Android, iOS and Windows Mobile…Oh My: An Introduction to PhoneGap

Jinal Patel Mobile, Tutorial, Xamarin 2 Comments

Attention: The following article was published over 11 years ago, and the information provided may be aged or outdated. Please keep that in mind as you read the post.With the growing adoption and reliance on smartphones and tablets in the competitive handheld industry, mobile applications need to be built across all major mobile operating platforms to reach the demanding customer …