Xamarin for Flutter developers
Taste for technologies, technology lovers
Love is two way road.
Context:
There are no good or bad programming languages, tools, technologies and paradigms or design patterns. Use of them depends from needs and context. As technology lover I used many programming languages AS, JS, JAVA,….. C# and lots of frameworks. Some I liked, some weren't for me other ware more natural, or work with other had fun but something was missing or simply was bored and need challenge, or have enterprise needs.
All balanced with customer and users needs.
- Tools
- Xamarin Platform, Blazor, Xamarin.Native and Xamarin.Forms
- UI the elegant XAML + Hot Reload/ Hot Reset
- Why some patterns evolved since WinForms?
- Creativity vs Cost of Support
- Patterns that kill will of creations
//todo if anyone want see what happened later give me a comment
Tools
You can pick from few : Visual Studio 2019 for Mac and Windows, JetBrains Rider.
Visual Studio Code is mostly used for code viewing.
I’m happy using VS on Windows + hot restart, if you are mac user probably Rider for coding and Vs for running will work best for you.
Since Visual Studio 2019 for windows option hot restart you don’t need to have Mac to develop for iOS but need iPhone:
Continuous Integration
Not having CI is not an option.
If have proper provisioning profile for iOS, private GitHub/BitBucket connected to App Center and hot restart and iOS device than you will probably not need mac machine at all.
Installing packages or writing own nuget
In Flutter you need to edit pubspec.yaml dependecies: and run terminal flutter pub get.
In .NET and Visual Studio it possible to install outside libraries via mouse click or package manager , from local, public or own server:
See and compare:
Note that Xamarin is just a small part of .NET, so out of box you can use many .net Standard libraries and with .NET 5 even more possibilities.
Routing and Navigation
Flutter way:
Xamarin is in market for a while there are many ways to do it if you are new than I would propose two approaches:
Xamarin.Forms Shell
Xamarin.Forms + Prism
See also:
UI Coding Style
Declarative UI or XAML you can write UI in many ways.
more on:
From Uno Platform pull on twitter
For many .NET developers XAML is clean and more readable that makes later support easer, but main argument for you to use XAML is HOT RELOAD.
Xamarin.Forms for Flutter developers
UI making main differences and popular controls: