Xamarin : The Next Big Thing in Mobile App Development.

Since Microsoft announced a global collaboration with Xamarin at the beginning of this year, the mobile app development world took notice of the relatively anonymous kin of the popular mobile app development across platforms.

To the layman Xamarin is just another platform for developing apps in C#. If you ask a techie he’ll beam at you before he goes on and on about how Xamarin has changed mobile app development and why is it the next big thing. If you are remotely interested in mobile apps, read on, we are about to tell you why Xamarin!

The buzz word with Xamarin is shared code.

What exactly is shared code?

Let’s say you are building the same application across platforms, Android, iOS and Windows and you want to write the code just once, is it possible? Of course it is. That’s what most mobile development platforms these days are trying to achieve. Increasing the re-usability of the code by adding native wrapper classes or native codes for integration with the native libraries is characteristic to any mobile app development platform. Xamarin claims that 75% of its code can be shared throughout different OS. If user interfaces are built with Xamarin.Forms, the shared code percentage could go well over 90%. Needless to say, this could be a huge time-saver!

It means that as a developer, your effort is reduced by a significant amount. It means that if you as a client are paying an app developer the cost of development goes down for you as well.

What Do All Products fall under Xamarin?

Xamarin. The platform, Xamarin. Form, Xamarin Studio, Xamarin. Mac, Xamarin for Visual Studio, Xamarin Test Cloud, Robo VM, and .Net Mobility Scanner are all the products that are enlisted under Xamarin (now acquired by Microsoft)

.Net Mobility Scanner Xamarin’s .Net Mobility Scanner lets developers see how much of their .NET code can run on other operating systems, specifically Android, iOS, Windows Phone, and Windows Store. It is a free Web-based service that uses Silverlight

The Xamarin Advantage for Enterprise Apps: