I wanted to start blogging but it seems like I didn’t cultivate that habit. Recently, my colleague who joined shortly, had chosen to leave the company. I guess that hit me off to think about the career that I want to build for myself.
Recently, I have started on Xamarin Studio on Mac for cross-platform mobile application development. Something that I have never thought to embark on. I started off with Java and has been in Java related ecosystem ever since. It’s deep enough an area to specialize.
However, in my current job, the company is heavily invested in C#/Azure stack. In addition, to do up an app quickly on both mobile platform, Xamarin seems to be a natural choice. Hence, I begin to code in C#. I have tried hybrid mobile app development on Ionic but I was rather unsatisfied at its performance. Scrolling was a major issue especially on the Android platform. I have tried ways to optimize that but with heavily customized card view in Ionic, the optimisation techniques do not apply (recycling scroll items). Thus, with these reasons, I thought to give Xamarin a try.
It was a painstaking effort to learn C#. The last time I covered C# was in university when we were using it for an assignment. Although LINQ was there since 2007, I have never heard of it, much less use it. I also didn’t know the differences between Components & NuGet Packages, C# directives. The inertia to learning a new language and tool were there, and thank God for Google and PluralSight, I managed to pick up some steam on it.
Next was to learn the specifics of each mobile platform and its wrappers in C#. Fortunately, xamarin had quite comprehensive documentation, which aided in my trial-and-error journey. It seems like much of the code reuse was made possible due to Xamarin Forms and it’s a good use case for me since data entry and display are what the app needs.
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