Announcing the Xamarin + Azure Functions Challenge!

Christos

September 24th, 2019

Who doesn’t love a developer competition, especially when it comes with some amazing prizes and the opportunity to learn something new? Over the past couple of months, we’ve been working closely with the Xamarin and Azure Functions teams to create a challenge that allows you to use your existing .NET skills to build and run a mobile app built with Xamarin that connects to a serverless Azure Function running on the cloud. You complete the challenge following the steps we create for you and you are automatically entered for the chance to win one of our prizes – simple as that!

The prizes

So what is the swag you may ask? OK, I see, straight to the interesting bits. The contest will run for a month and at the end, there will be 2 types of prizes. For the first tier, we will randomly select 1000 lucky participants for $25 Xbox Gold gift cards. For the top tier, we will randomly select 10 participants for Surface Headphones prize worth $349.00 (at the time of the contest). If you have any questions about the competition, you can find what you need in our Terms and Conditions.

Ready for it? – On to the challenge!

The prerequisites

If this is your first time working with Xamarin and/or Azure Functions, there is a bit of setup required. The setup is slightly different depending on whether you prefer to develop on Windows or macOS. On Windows, you’ll need to download and install Visual Studio 2019 Community (i.e. free) with the Xamarin workload using our Xamarin-optimized installer. On macOS, you’ll need to download and install Visual Studio 2019 Community for Mac and follow the instructions in the documentation to set up Xamarin.

To deploy and run your Azure Functions, you first need an Azure account. You can sign up for a totally FREE account here. And while you’re at it, I would encourage you to take a look at all the different services you can run with your free credit. You can run and debug your Azure Function locally on both Windows and macOS machines using either Visual Studio or Visual Studio for Mac before deploying it to your Azure environment.

The Challenge

The way we structured the challenge gives you an opportunity to learn how to work with both the Xamarin framework to develop mobile apps and how to use Functions to create an API endpoint. We have explicit steps that explain what you need to do to complete the challenge and there are a couple of configuration settings that you need to execute to ensure that you met the requirements. In the end, all you have to do deploy the Azure Function to your Azure Subscription and then launch and run the mobile app you built with .NET and Xamarin using either an emulator or a physical device. Complete and submit the in-app form with your contact details to enter the prize draw.

What are you waiting for?

Now that you know what you need to do for a chance to win, head to the GitHub repo to start the challenge. And if this challenge intrigues you enough to see what else you can build with Xamarin and Azure Functions, make sure to read our getting started guides: Getting Started with Xamarin + Create your first Azure Function