Xamarin: //build 2016 Tech Adventure Pack Contest Winners

Last week we invited the Xamarin community to post pictures of yourselves with any Xamarin logo at //build 2016 and the hashtags #Build2016 and #Xamarin in the tweet text. We received MANY fantastic entries and chose five winners at random to receive a Tech Adventure Pack, including a DJI Phantom 4 drone and a Sphero […]

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Craig Dunn: Introducing Xamarin Workbooks

The first public demonstration of Xamarin’s new Workbooks idea was Miguel de Icaza’s //build 2016 talk “Mobile First” (although he first wrote about it back in February). In his talk, Miguel demonstrates a new take on interactive documentation in which a Markdown-formatted file can live-execute C# code-fenced blocks; not just in-line but also in an iOS or Android simulator.

This opens up a great opportunity to write and share interactive documentation that not only describes an API or feature, but shows it in action. Further, it’s easy to write, being based on the well-known Markdown format.

Give it a try!

You can now try Workbooks for yourself! The editor can be downloaded here, and there is some Workbook documentation on the Xamarin developer portal.

I’ve thrown together a few very simple ideas on github:

  • C# 6 – an interactive workbook version of Xamarin’s C# 6 Overview.
  • Mastermind – an attempt to build a simple game.
  • Magic Eight Ball – since I’ve built that for a number of different platforms previously:
See Miguel’s talk (if you didn’t already) for a really cool demo.

Some Notes

  1. They’re written in Markdown, but with a .workbook file extension.
  2. Each file begins with a small JSON-formatted metadata section. The editor will add this for you.
  3. C# code inside triple-backtick code fences will be executed when the file is viewed in the Workbooks editor. 

There’s sure to be other resources popping up now that the project preview is publicly available — Ben Bishop’s video is the first community resource I’ve seen. Can’t wait to see what everyone creates with it!

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Xamarin: Contest: Get Answering on Stack Overflow

Now that every developer has access to Xamarin to develop iOS and Android applications in C# and Visual Studio, we want to make sure our community is on the right foot to scale with the growing interest and demand in mobile .NET development. As Director of Customer Support at Xamarin, it’s my pleasure to announce to […]

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Xamarin: Xamarin Events in April

With all of the new, exciting announcements between Xamarin and Microsoft these past few weeks, there is no better time to sync up with your local community and recap on all of the latest in mobile development! Find an awesome user group, conference, hackathon, or other mobile event happening this month all over the world. […]

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Adam J Wolf: Weekly Xamarin Newsletter Issue #86

Xamarin for Everyone Nat Friedman announces Xamarin Studio now includes Xamarin. Early Preview of Exrin Adam Pedley releases an MVVM framework for Xamarin.Forms. Simplify Sharing with Plugins for Xamarin Pierce Boggan introduces the Share Plugin for Xamarin and Windows. Testing Xamarin.Forms apps with RockMvvmForms and NUnit Ramon Esteban shows you how to test with the […]

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