What is Xamarin ?

Pre-requisite Knowledge

Before we start with the understanding of Xamarin, we should know-

1. HTML/ XML Familiarity
2. A little knowledge of .NET and C#
3. For the Hands-On, we’ll need a mobile device or a good performance GPU, for creating virtual Device(s)

Introduction of Xamarin | What is Xamarin?

Before getting to what is Xamarin, let me share a little history of Xamarin. It was founded in 2011 May, by the engineers who created Mono (Xamarin.Android-> Formerly Mono for Android). Since 2-16 February 04, Xamarin is owned by Microsoft.

Xamarin is an open-source, free, and cross-platform application development platform to build Android and Windows Applications. So with just a C# Code, one can easily write an actual native Android & iOS Applications.

Why should we use Xamarin?

According to Microsoft Documentation:

1. It is a base framework made on top of .NET to access native features of different OS
2. Beautiful frontend designed in XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language)
3. Availability of platform-specific libraries
4. Perform a full ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation on apps to reduce startup time, increase memory sharing, and improve performance.
5. One-Stop solution for a cross-platform application development

What are the software prerequisites for getting started?

• Visual Studio Community Edition Download Here:
  • [for Windows]
  • [for Mac]
• Xamarin Workload in Visual Studio [For Steps Refer to this]

Now let’s build a Hello- World! Application

• Start Visual Studio (in my case present build: vs2019)
  
• Click on Create New Project
  
• Search for "Xamarin" in the Search box on top and then select "Mobile App (Xamarin.Forms)"
  
• Let’s give our App a Name
  
• Select a Blank App Template.
  
• In Xamarin.Forms App, the Shared Code resides under, [AppName]-> xaml.
  
• Currently, I'll be running a UWP (Universal Windows Platform) run to test the App, though in the End there are some Android Screenshots too...
• Let's make a little change in the XAML file (the Front End UI)
  
• Let's run the App by Clicking on theLocal Machine Button, make sure to select the [AppName].UWP from the Startup Project.
  
  
  
  
  
• Change the Label text to "Hello World, This is my First Xamarin App!!!"
  
  
  
  
  
• Now Let's Run the App Again
  
• Hurrah!! We've successfully created our First Xamarin Mobile App...
• Note: For Xamarin for Mac Users, if we want to deploy your Application to Apple iPhone, then we`ll need a Mac Device for Development...
  Android App ScreenShot-
  

Conclusion:

In this article, we have learned about:

1. 1. Xamarin
   2. Creating our first application “HelloWorld” in Xamarin