Lit Up Buildings For Mac
We explore the potential of building native MacOS apps with Xamarin.Forms and Telerik UI. The promise of has been undeniable for developers - write apps in C#/XAML and reach a variety of platforms. Xamarin democratizes mobile development for.NET developers with two huge wins - reuse existing skills and build apps for popular mobile platforms. And you can light up your Xamarin mobile apps with polished performant UI controls with - you shouldtryit. But mobile isn't everything, Could Xamarin.Form's reach be stretched to other platforms?
Turns out, the world can be an oyster for.NET developers and lots of efforts are underway to substantially increase Xamarin.Form's potential across platforms. This article explores the possibilities for native MacOS apps through Xamarin.Forms - yup, Mac apps written in C#/XAML with no platform-specific code! Xamarin.Forms Heads With traditional Xamarin, we were able to abstract out app business logic into a C# layer - this was a big step in the right direction, but needed developers to build the UI for each supporting platform separately.
While this approach (called Xamarin.iOS or Xamarin.Android) is a legit strategy for native platform-specific apps, it needs.NET developers to know the details on how to build iOS/Android UI - this is uncomfortable zone for many. Enter Xamarin.Forms - offering.NET developers an UI abstraction layer. Developers now get to write XAML in a shared UI layer - at runtime, Xamarin.Forms turns around to render native UI for each platform. The platforms that Xamarin.Forms supports are often referred to as Heads. And the magic of turning generic XAML into native UI for each platform is done by the Renderers - there are renderers for each Xamarin.Forms UI abstraction which do the heavy lifting to render appropriate UI for corresponding platforms. So could Xamarin.Forms have more heads? Sure thing - just add more renderers for newer platforms that need to be supported.
The reality is a little more complicated, but the good news is that some very sharp minds are working on taking Xamarin.Forms places. Efforts are underway to take Xamarin.Forms support to several new platforms - like MacOS, and even. The story of Xamarin.Forms' reach is about to get a whole lot better! The MacOS Project Since Xamarin.Forms 2.3.5 Pre-Release,. It is pretty magical to think that developers can now build truly native Mac apps with only a few tweaks in Xamarin.Forms - and with minimal platform specific code. Let's take a look as to how we add MacOS support in an existing Xamarin.Forms solution - this is the future. First, MacOS support is obviously a Mac-only feature - no other way to run native Mac apps.
Granted you are in and have an existing Xamarin.Forms solution, the first step is to add a MacOS project. Until MacOS support is official, Xamarin.Forms will not have VS project templates. It's easy to get around this by adding a Mac ( Cocoa app) to your Xamarin.Forms solution, like below. This is similar to what you may do if building apps with C# - except that instead of Storyboards, we'll use Xamarin.Forms to render the UI. Telerik UI So now that you can build MacOS apps with Xamarin.Forms, the next frontier should be - building beautiful MacOS apps. Id card design software for mac.
Lit Up Buildings For Mac 2017
Keep in mind, MacOS support through Xamarin.Forms is very much a Preview - with several known UI issues. However, most generic Xamarin.Forms UI controls should work as is in Mac apps. While you can reuse XAML from PCL project views, one consideration to keep in mind is the additional real estate of Mac apps compared to mobile form factors. App UI is likely going to need rethinking, now that the target platform is Mac desktop. Out of the box Xamarin.Forms controls only go so far though, when trying to build gorgeous app UI. Developers often augment their development arsenal to fill the UI gaps - and pick up well-engineered polished UI controls for Xamarin.Forms apps. To that end, is here to help you build fluid UX through UI controls that are too hard to create from scratch.
Telerik UI for Xamarin provides performant native UI widgets for all your Xamarin apps - Xamarin.iOS, Xamarin.Android and of course, Xamarin.Forms. Go ahead, give it a try by downloading the bits in a free trial today.
So now that Xamarin.Forms apps can target MacOS, your obvious curiosity may be - can I use Telerik UI for Xamarin controls in my Mac apps? The answer is yes and no. First up, slow down and realize that MacOS support for Xamarin.Forms will be in Preview for a while - these are hot bits we're playing with that can make compatibility fragile. And there are NuGet dependencies that just don't work in MacOS world until things are straightened out. But the promise is there. To get started, first thing we need to do is add Telerik UI for Xamarin references to our Mac project - hopefully, you already have this for your other Xamarin.Forms projects. While you can do things manually, pulling in Telerik UI for Xamarin bits into an existing project is best done through the NuGet route.
Light Up Buildings For Macbook Pro
You can bring in the bits from the Telerik NuGet server - simply set it up as a NuGet source with your credentials. So few of the Telerik UI for Xamarin bits do work unofficially in an unofficial MacOS Preview for Xamarin.Forms. What does this mean then - nothing more than geekiness to push the envelope. Rest assured, once Xamarin.Forms officially supports MacOS as a platform, we'll explore how viable Telerik UI for Xamarin controls would be for Mac apps. But you clearly see the promise - wouldn't it be cool to light up your Mac apps with polished Telerik UI? Extend Your Reach Xamarin.Forms is awesome - it enables.NET developers to take their apps to hitherto unreachable platforms. C#/XAML can light up apps for Mobile/Tablet platforms and even Augmented/Mixed Reality.
And with the upcoming support for MacOS and Linux, Xamarin.Forms should be able to reach all Desktop platforms as well. And Telerik UI for Xamarin will continue to evolve to provide polished UI for all you.NET ninjas. Keep dreaming the dream with Xamarin.Forms - the reality keeps getting better.