Xamarin Evolve Day 1 Recap

At the moment of writing i’m still at Xamarin Evolve. Yesterday was the first day of the conference where all the new goodies were announced. Time for a quick recap of what was announced and the sessions i followed.

The day started with a so called “mini-hack” at 6.15 in the morning. There are several mini-hacks at evolve most of them require you to do some basic exercise with a specific technology or tool such as Hockeyapp, MS Cognitive services, Bitwise etc. This one was a bit different. Craig Dunn organised a 5k run at 6.15 in the morning with a bunch of Xamarinians. I joined together with my Colleague Roy and other Dutchguy Marco Kuiper. It was a great run and really gave a boost of energy to start the day. After that it was time to get breakfast and head to the keynote.

Just finished the 5k run mini hack at #XamarinEvolve with @conceptdev . I should do this more often…. pic.twitter.com/6gfL3lZ8PQ

— Geert vd Cruijsen (@GeertvdC) April 27, 2016

Keynote: Nat took the stage and told everyone about some things that happened since the Microsoft takeover. Interest in Xamarin increased by 3x since the announcement of the Microsoft merge. Great times to be a Xamarin developer! After Nat, Miguel took the stage to show us the new stuff.

Here we go #XamarinEvolve keynote by @natfriedman and @migueldeicaza pic.twitter.com/Z946rIMZ8P — Geert vd Cruijsen (@GeertvdC) April 27, 2016

Miguel showed us the dark theme for Xamarin studio for us young hackers. (felt me feel young again) I  really like using the dark theme in Visual studio and now we also can in Xamarin Studio. Xamarin also included a lot of Roslyn features to improve code quality and to help you build beautiful code.

Xamarin also announced that they are open sourcing all the SDK’s and they will be located at open.xamarin.com. In the first few hours there were already pull requests which i think is pretty cool.

Miguel invited Nina Vyedin on stage to talk about the Xamarin forms previewer. Nina explained that XAML officially stands for Xamarin And Microsoft Love and after that she showed us how the Xamarin forms previewer works. I think this was THE feature where a lot of people were waiting for.

Miguel took over again after Nina and showed us his new baby the Xamarin Workbooks. i have to say i really love the workbooks and have played with it after they were released at BUILD. Workbooks are a great tool to teach people new features in Xamarin or C# in general. Workbooks are basically MarkDown files that contain text and also pieces of code. these pieces of code can be ran onto a simulator in real time. There are several sample workbooks which can be found here: https://github.com/xamarin/Workbooks

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