Cross-Platform Mobile Development in Visual Studio

Editor's Notes

• #7: Fast Enough for Games Native UX means that apps look like they belong Full platform SDK Access means that anything you can do in Obj-C on iOS or Java in Android, you can do here. Animation libraries, Media libraries, etc.
• #8: Need better graphic for this.
• #11: Need Visual Studio Screenshot
• #16: A good layered architecture allows for proper separation of responsibility and encapsulation, providing isolation to allow for code changes and maximizing code sharing between platforms. It also provides a pattern-agnostic framework so you can pick and choose which patterns you want to use, and then be flexible to changing them later on. And this is very simple to do. We’ll see later on how to accomplish this with proper namespacing and project setup.
• #18: Xamarin supports portable library projects, but they pose practical problems in real-world scenarios because of dependencies. it eliminates the ability to use ifDefs, so you have to do massive architectural refactoring, use the provider/simple dependency pattern, etc. to solve even minor things. Best way, instead is to link your code.
• #20: Don’t use .Android - the namespace will cause you hell
• #21: Download install, and configure the plugin as state on the git page. Must create the initial MonoTouch application on a mac. Copy it over to your VS machine, into your project. or just synchronize in your source control. Edit the <ItemGroup> that has the “System” entry to include the mscorlib and monotouch items Finally, remove the mscorlib.dll reference in project settings : build : advanced.
• #22: Download install, and configure the plugin as state on the git page. Must create the initial MonoTouch application on a mac. Copy it over to your VS machine, into your project. or just synchronize in your source control. Edit the <ItemGroup> that has the “System” entry to include the mscorlib and monotouch items Finally, remove the mscorlib.dll reference in project settings : build : advanced.
• #23: Xamarin supports portable library projects, but they pose practical problems in real-world scenarios because of dependencies. it eliminates the ability to use ifDefs, so you have to do massive architectural refactoring, use the provider/simple dependency pattern, etc. to solve even minor things. Best way, instead is to link your code. There are two ways to do this. The magical way, or the manual way. Automatic linking is done fia the Project Linker VS Add-in. Manual is just plain old file links - your only option in MD. Simply add a project link to the corelib, and when you add/remove classes there, they’ll show up in your app projects. if you put your classes in folders, they’ll link nicely into your apps. The manual way is to simply add existing files and make sure they’re added as links.
• #24: You can use SQLite on all three mobile platforms, iOS, Android, and WP7. on iOS and Android, SQLite is bundled with it, and on Windows Phone, you can use the open source C# port. We’ll show later how to easily support this cross platform with the same exact API. Additionally, we recommend SQLite.NET ORM for easy data access. For Data Access, we’ve added some nice convenience methods in TaskDatabase.cs that make the basic CRUD operations a snap with zero code.
• #25: Platforms are different. pInvoke is available on iOS and Android, not on WP. SQLite is native on Android and iOS, on WP you have to use the C# lib. Devices also have different features. Cameras are different on nearly every single android device out there. Some devices have location features, some don’t. Some vary, etc.
• #26: There are predefined symbols that allow you to use different code, depending on the platform you’re building for. Additionally, you can define your own symbols in Build Settings. Demo of this in use can be found here: TaskyPro :: CoreLib.DataLayer/SQLite.cs
• #27: ITask - Interface TaskBase - Task class DialogTask - with MT.D annotations