Here’s all about my tech talk at Xamarin Dev Days Singapore 2017, under the session, Cross Platform Native UI with Xamarin.Forms…
So on 4th of November Xamarin Dev Days Singapore 2017, concluded with a massive success, with a full house attendance, and as of me I happened be a presenter there.
Hosted by Microsoft with the support of Xamariners and SyncFusion, it was a full day community event.
As of myself, Udara Alwis, I was presenting my tech talk session on Cross Platform Native UI with Xamarin.Forms, where talked all about Xamarin.Forms and building cross platform apps with fully native look and feels, while being able to access platform specific features easily, and the latest updates and features of Xamarin.Forms.
Along side with an in detailed Live Demo of how Xamarin.Forms runs natively on Android, iOS and Windows with all the native look and feels.
Here are the event details if anyone’s keep on tito, Xamarin Dev Days event Link: on tito. Also if anyone’s looking for the Event photos, its all hosted in the Xamariners Facebook page and Meetup event page: on Meetup
So I’m about to share some of the stuff I presented at my talk there, although I will not be diving into every single detail I talked about there, only be focusing on the key points.
Cross Platform Native UI with Xamarin.Forms…
So as we all aware, Xamarin.Forms is all about allowing developers to build native UIs for Android, iOS and Windows from single shared C# code base, while maintaining full native look and feels as well as native features.
In the beginning we had native Xamarin, which is the C# and dot net wrapper around the native platforms, where you had to manually develop the UI layer for each specific platform, but still allowing the shared business logic.
Then came Xamarin.Forms, the new abstraction layer that sits on top of the native platforms and abstracts up all the common properties and behaviors to a single abstraction layer, allowing you to develop the UI in one single code base and deploy directly into native platforms, along with the shared business logic. 😉
Windows vs Xamarin.Forms Development…
Here I did something pretty special that is to compare the UI Controls in Windows Dev Environment, and Xamarin.Forms Dev Environment. This helped most of developers who comes from Windows Development background to easily familiarize themselves for Xamarin.Forms development.
As of the MVVM Architect savvy fellas, do not worry Xamarin.Forms supports full binding out of the box, just like you had in Windows Development.
Eco System and Community…
It had been an incredible rise of the community around Xamarin since the Open-Source initiation by Microsoft, with some incredible statistics. 😮
Some of the Latest and Greatest in Xamarin.Forms…
In this section I dived into some of the latest updates of Xamarin.Forms.
Native View Declarations..
Now you can declare Platform Specific Elements inside your Xamarin.Forms pages, yes that’s correct even from XAML directly. 😀
Page Embedding…
Page Embedding has been one of my favorites, being able to embed Xamarin.Forms Elements in your Xamarin Native code. A great way to adopt Xamarin.Forms elements into your existing Xamarin Native applications. 😉
New Performance Updates…
Yes the Engineers in Xamarin has been busy with improving the performance of Xamarin.Forms lately, which is pretty impressive…
Layout Compression…
So whenever you create user interface in your mobile app, it forms some kind of a hierarchy of the Layouts and Control Elements. And you know for a fact the more higher the hierarchy the more performance is consumed by the Layout Renderer.
So its the same case here in Xamarin Forms, specially here it adds some extra layers in between the UI elements to do its Native Magic.
As you can see above the Xamarin.Forms Layout has 12 Elements in the UI, but in reality at run time it increases up to 19 Elements in the UI.
That’s why they’re introducing this new performance enhancement feature called Layout Compression. So what this new feature does it is remove the unnecessary nesting of the hierarchy and compress it as much as possible.
There you can see above as a result of the new feature how the Layout Hierarchy is flatted and compressed down to 16 Elements.
Fast Renderers…
Yes that literally means speeding up the Rendering process of a given Element at runtime. As we know in Xamarin.Forms, each UI Element has a Renderer attached to it, that handles all the native mapping with Xamarin.Forms layer. This Renderer layer also contributes to the unnecessary UI hierarchy for the Layout Renderer.
That is why with this new Fast Renderers feature they’re merging the Element and its Native Renderer into one single Element, causing the whole UI Layout Hierarchy to compress down itself even further.
As a result you can see above example, the 12 Elements hierarchy we had in Xamarin.Forms has compressed down to 10 Elements at run time, resulting in massive performance improvement.
New Backends…
So Xamarin.Forms is all about Cross Platform application development, that’s why they’re now expanding their horizons into some new platforms, allowing you to write you code in Xamarin.Forms in a single code base and deploy to the new platforms right away, without having to write any native code line at all… 😉
- Tizen : yaay! Samsung devices…
- WPF: Oh yeah! beautiful WPF, here we come…
- GTK#: Ubuntu? or whatever your Linux flavor… 😉
- MacOS: Woot! Woot! MacOS apps…
More…
And with a lot more awesomeness…
All of it on github…
That’s right, I’ve hosted all of the slideshow and the full demo code up in my github: https://github.com/UdaraAlwis/XamarinDevDays-2017-Singapore-Udara
Finally thanks everyone who attended Xamarin Dev Days Singapore 2017 and contributed to make it a success. 😀
Cheers!
ÇøŋfuzëÐ SøurcëÇødë 
Great job 🙂
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Thanks buddy 🙂
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