What is Xamarin? - Part II

Checkout Part I

Is Xamarin the best cross-platform development tool?

Xamarin enables the best of both worlds—providing the advantages of native UI, access to device features, and native performance coupled with the time-to-market advantages of code sharing and reuse.

Companies that build software using Xamarin achieve cost effective cross platform development and have the flexibility to handle native user experience.

Why C# is Awesome?

• Setting up event handling is a breeze
• The async and await keywords make asynchronous programming incredibly pleasant and code will be much more linear and much easier to understand
• Use LINQ to query, filter and select data from in-memory arrays, or from databases such as SQLite
• Statically typed so you avoid a pitfall of errors that afflict other languages
• Conditional compilation
• Intellisense, lambdas, etc. are all awesome
• Json.NET offers simple conversions to and from JSON strings and .NET objects, with SerializeObject and DeserializeObject methods
• Parsing XML is easy

How Xamarin.Android works?

Android has its own runtime environment called Dalvik, which is used to execute conventional java based Android applications. Android’s platform specific functionality is made accessible through Java APIs that are tied to the Dalvik environment.

Xamarin.Android applications use the Mono and Dalvik runtimes at the same time, allowing developers to take advantage of the full range of functionality offered by both environments. Mono itself operates on Android much as it would in any other computing environment—it uses standard Mono JIT compilation. Fully transparent interaction between Mono and Dalvik is made possible by leveraging standard Java Native Interface (JNI) calls. Android’s open platform model enables Xamarin to leverage the full power of Mono while providing deep interoperability with the platform’s native development stack. As a result, Xamarin applications run just like regular Java-based Android applications, but with full access to all of the functionality provided by Mono.

The Managed Callable Wrapper is the wrapper code that converts Mono generated code to Java Code. MCW is called when managed code in Mono runtime needs to invoke Android code in Dalvik VM. 

The Android Callable Wrapper is invoked when the Android runtime wants to call the Managed Code after an Android event.

Xamarin Developer Certifications

Xamarin skills are increasingly in demand – certifications let the market know you represent top talent