This is what I gathered from the talk “The Next Transformation in Mobile Development with Xamarin” from Build 2019. It was entertaining as well as educational to listen to the talk of James Montemagno and Miguel de Icaza.
Here are the bullet points in short.
- Xamarin is improving the performance of the Build Time, Deploy time and the Dex Time. They plan to improve it further in this area.
- It looks like Xamarin Forms and Xamarin Essential are being promoted to improve the productivity of the developers.
- CollectionView is a cool control. It looks impressive and operates fast.
- Xamarin also provides new feature where App can look consistent across platforms. If you ask me why would they need it? Are people not happy with native look and feel?
Personally, I would prefer native look and feel. But if this is an enterprise app that requires customer support, it would be more beneficial to provide consistent look and feel. As business apps do not need “cool” looks and this can save cost on support training and context switching between platforms.
- Forms has a new feature “Shell”. One of the features Xamarin Forms was lacking was the infrastructure to Navigate. Shell provides good navigation infrastructure by
- Providing tabs and ability to host Content pages in tabs
- The tabs can be easily customized to appears at the top/bottom of the screen
- It also provides search capability.
If I were to write another app from scratch, I would definitely use shell.
- They plan to provide interop with java, Objective-C and Swift. With this, the existing apps can preserve their investment.
Xamarin certainly has potential to succeed even further.
The session can be viewed here:
Sameer's Technology Blog 