Xamarin: Accelerate Mobile App Development with Over 500 Components

It’s been a very productive year for the components team, and today we’re proud to announce that we now have over 500 components in the Xamarin Component Store! In addition to all of the new and exciting components we’ve added this year, we’ve also been busy keeping our existing components fresh and making them even more awesome!

The Best of All Worlds

As a Xamarin developer, you can leverage great .NET libraries in your mobile apps as well as native Objective-C and Java libraries. Many of the best packages on CocoaPods and Maven are already available as C# components in the Xamarin Component Store, including a few new ones:

• MapBox provides an SDK for pixel-perfect vector maps on iOS and Android that are fast, secure, and extremely battery efficient with lots of customization options.
• GPU Image lets you apply GPU-accelerated filters and other effects to images, live camera video, and movies, and can provide up to 100x better performance for applying filters than an equivalent CPU-based filter.
• Urban Airship provides a full suite of mobile engagement tools for building next-generation apps.

There are dozens of other new and updated components, including:

• Microsoft Band provides a path for developers to enhance and extend the experience of their apps to their customers’ wrists by providing access to the sensors available on the band, as well as the ability to create and send notifications to tiles.
• EMDK provides a set of tools to create powerful line of business applications for Zebra Android devices.
• Genetics for Android allows attributes to be used to describe how to inject resources, views, and events into an object, such as automatically attaching event handlers to View events.
• ZXing.Net.Mobile for Xamarin.Forms brings powerful barcode scanning to all of the platforms with full Xamarin.Forms support.

We’re thrilled to see so many of our partners, such as Microsoft, Oracle, and Amazon expanding their Xamarin Component Store presence as well. Additionally, select components now provide live sample app previews directly on the page for the component, allowing you to try out components before bringing them into your apps. For example, you can play our UrhoSharp sample 3D game or explore Android easing functions directly from the browser before you download the associated components!

Build and Submit Your Own

There has never been a better time to build and submit your own library to the Xamarin Component Store. The Component Store is a great way to promote the hard work that you’ve put into your libraries and to help other developers accelerate their mobile app development. Read our submission documentation on how to get started building your own components today. If you’re already shipping a library as a NuGet package, be sure to check out our brand new Component and NuGet packaging documentation, which allows you to bundle your NuGet and dependencies directly into the packaging of your component.

Get Started Using Components

With the help of the Component Store, you can accelerate your mobile app development by taking advantage of over 500 components. From user interface and design to the backend services that power your app, the Component Store has it all. If you’re not sure where to get started, we’ve made it even faster to start building with components by including start up guides and working samples reviewed by Xamarin’s Components Team. Head over to the Xamarin Components Store today to get started!