It was 26th July 2013, the first Xamarin Community meet happened in Bangalore @ 1MG mall with the community guys Vic Parmar, Lohith GN, Pooran Prasad, Abhishek Narain, Vijay Raj and the Xamarin Developer Evangelist Nishanth Anil. The day well started with meeting the community guys and having a quick chat about the technology stuffs later which Nishant showcased few of the Apps that was developed with Xamarin (C# code but apps run in iOS and Android devices) which is something interesting for the core Microsoft developers.    [more]

About Xamarin:

Xamarin is a Cross Platform Application Development framework for the traditional Microsoft C#.Net developers. This environment supports developing application for iOS, Android, Mac and Windows with code written in C# Language with all the properties and methods supported by the .Net Framework. The environment is more powerful to reuse the code between the different platforms with the libraries developed with a single platform.

Xamarin has a beautiful IDE called the XAMARIN Studio which is light and used to develop cross platform application in one place. Also they provide support with the Native Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment as well. The Xamarin Studio is integrated with the Software development Kits so we can build the application and test it with the simulators and real devices with simple clicks. Also the IDE is free for the community so we can start developing the applications by directly downloading from the Xamarin website.

About the pricing for the developers Xamarin provides free license where we can download the Xamarin Studio and start building the application but limited to the application size of 32KB (If I am not wrong) and for the enterprise and Business they have different pricing model per user license, per platform which I personally think Xamarin need to rework on their pricing model to attract better deals.

Community Meet:

The first Xamarin Community meet held @ 1MG Mall in a restaurant “The Tao Terrace” with a lunch sponsored by the Xamarin. We discussed a lot about the product, how effectively develop the cross platform application, pros and cons and finally about setting up a Xamarin Community in Bangalore. Thanks to Nishant Anil for his effort in showcasing all the necessary tools and environment with an example in building an application and deploying to the device in real time.

Xamarin Resources:

Xamarin Docs gives you a good insight about the platform along with code recipes that you can directly use in your applications.

• Docs: http://docs.xamarin.com/ 
• Code Recipes: http://docs.xamarin.com/recipes/
• Xamarin.iOS samples: https://github.com/xamarin/monotouch-samples
• Xamarin.Android samples: https://github.com/xamarin/monodroid-samples
• Cross-platform samples: https://github.com/xamarin/mobile-samples/

My journey with Xamarin starts now, after seeing this platform I can visualize how effectively we can utilize this environment to build good quality Cross Platform Apps in no time. Follow this series, in coming days I will be writing about developing cross platform apps with Xamarin with Xamarin Studio and Visual Studio.