Bilgin - Mastering cross-platform development with Xamarin master the skills required to steer cross-platform applications from drawing board to app store (s) using Xamarin

Can Bilgin currently works for Authority Partners Inc. as a program architect. He has been working in the software industry, primarily with Microsoft technologies, for over a decade and has been recognized as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for his technical contributions. In this period, he played key roles in projects for high profile clients using technologies such as BizTalk, SharePoint, Dynamics CRM, Xamarin, WCF, and other web technologies.

His main passion lies in mobile and IoT development using the modern toolset available for developers.

He tries to share his experience on his blog (http://canbilgin.wordpress.com), social media (@can_bilgin), and through speaking engagements at both local and international conferences and community events in the Balkans region.

This book is dedicated to three girls who shaped my life and still are doing so: my best friend and beloved wife, Sanja Grebovic Bilgin, our little daughter, Dilara Bilgin, and my loving mother, Turkan Bilgin.

Engin Polat has been involved in many large and medium-scale projects on .NET technologies as a developer, architect, and consultant, and has won many awards since 1999.

Since 2008, he has been giving training to many large enterprises in Turkey about Windows development, web development, distributed application development, software architecture, mobile development, cloud development, and so on.

Apart from this, he organizes seminars and events in many universities in Turkey about .NET technologies, Windows platform development, cloud development, web development, game development, and so on.

He shares his experiences on his personal blog (http://www.enginpolat.com).

He has MCP, MCAD, MCSD, MCDBA, and MCT certifications.

In 2012, he was recognized as a Windows Platform Development MVP (Most Valuable Professional) by Microsoft.

Between 2013 and 2015, he was recognized as a Nokia Developer Champion; very few people in the world are given this award. In 2015, he was recognized as the Regional Director by Microsoft.

I'd like to thank my dear wife, Yeliz, and my beautiful daughter, Melis Ada, for all the support they gave me while I was working on this book project.

Lance McCarthy , Microsoft MVP, is a community leader with an acute expertise for all things, such as .NET and C#, especially on the XAML stack, including WPF, Silverlight, Windows Phone, and Windows Store apps. He is very helpful online and guides and answers questions from Microsoft developers on Twitter as @lancewmccarthy. In his free time, he writes his blog at http://WinPlatform.wordpress.com, which focuses on Windows Universal apps. He organizes and hosts events in the Boston area, such as user group nights, mini-code camps, and full hackathons.

During the day, he is a senior technical support engineer at Telerik where he supports developers with their Classic Windows, Universal Windows Platform, Web and Mobile application development (Xamarin, Android native, and iOS native). He is also a technical consultant for the Windows Developer social media team where he helps respond to development questions via the official @WindowsDev Twitter account.

Previously, he worked for Nokia/Microsoft as a developer ambassador where he sought out and engaged developers through outreach programs and provided them with technical support and resources to make them successful on the Windows Phone and Windows 8 platforms.

He was also an assistant professor at Harvard University for a short time where he helped students build, market, and publish successful Windows Phone apps. At Boston University, he was a guest professor for the Cloud computing course and would teach one class a semester.

He has also appeared on podcasts, such as the Windows Developer Show, has been a technical editor for publications and books, has won several app building contests and hackathons (including the first place in the Microsoft Build 2013 hackathon), and is a published developer with over a million downloads in the Windows Store.

I'd like to thank my wife Amy for her undying patience while I did "more work after I got home from work" and to Can Bilgin for the opportunity to review this.

Although it was initially born as a community effort to port the .NET libraries and common language runtime compilers to various operating systems, the Xamarin product suite soon became the common ground to develop applications for Android and iOS operating systems using the .NET framework and the most popular CLR language, C#. The emergence of the Xamarin development platform created a new development niche, serving products to a variety of platforms at the same time while letting users adapt their existing .NET development skills to these new platforms and produce applications for a wider range of devices and operating systems. Thanks to Xamarin, developers are now enjoying a new era where development efforts don't target only a single application platform, but span multiple devices including smart phones, tablets, personal computers, and even wearable devices, creating highly efficient native applications.