Xamarin Worldwide Developer Conference

Join us at Xamarin Evolve 2013 April 14-17 in Austin, TX. Register now, early-bird pricing expires on January 25th.

We're thrilled to announce Bart Decrem, SVP and General Manager for Disney Mobile Games, as a speaker for Evolve 2013. Bart was founder and CEO of Tapulous, which Disney acquired in 2010. Bart now runs Disney Mobile Games, the group behind Where's My Water, Temple Run: Brave and Where's My Perry. Come to Xamarin Evolve 2013 and learn directly from Bart what it takes to build great mobile user experiences and smash hits.

We are looking for inspiring app success stories and amazing technical talks to further round out the roster. If you’ve got a great story to tell and want to speak at Xamarin Evolve 2013, email evolve@xamarin.com and tell us about your talk. Bonus points: include a link to your video manifesto with all of the reasons why you should speak at Evolve 2013

Introducing Xamarin.Mac

You can now expand the reach of your C# application to 66 million Mac OS X users with Xamarin.Mac, a new product that we launched last month. Xamarin.Mac makes it possible to use C# to build self-contained Mac OS X apps that are suitable for publication in Apple’s Mac App Store.

Xamarin.Mac exposes native platform APIs, allowing developers to build self-contained Cocoa applications that integrate with platform conventions and leverage the rich spectrum of platform-specific functionality that make Mac apps so beautiful and distinctive. Sign up today to attend our one-hour Xamarin.Mac online seminar, led by Xamarin CTO and cofounder Miguel de Icaza.

Xamarin is Hiring

We are looking for people who have a technical background, are passionate about mobile development and also enjoy interacting with customers. This is your opportunity to become a part of one of the fastest-growing startups in the mobile space. So if you are a developer interested in engaging on a daily basis with our amazing community of C# developers who are building cutting-edge mobile apps on Xamarin, check out our open positions. It’s an adventure that you won’t want to miss.

Over 200,000 developer are building apps with Xamarin

We experienced tremendous growth last year as adoption of our platform reached extraordinary new heights. We’re very proud to announce that over 200,000 developers are now building applications with Xamarin. And we’re just getting started–we have some great plans for 2013 that will expand the reach of our community even further.

We’re thrilled that our products are making development faster and easier for so many developers around the world–and we’re humbled by the breathtaking range of brilliant apps that so many of you have made with our tools. We want to take this opportunity to thank you all for making 2012 such a great year for us!

DevRadio: Using Xamarin to Create Draw a Stickman app for Windows 8

Watch the video of Nat Friedman, CEO of Xamarin and Chris Mills, President of HitCents, talk with Microsoft Developer Evangelist Jerry Nixon discussing Using Xamarin to create the Draw a Stickman app for Windows 8.

From our blog

HOWTO: MonoTouch Enterprise Deployment: Jeff Stedfast offers simple step-by-step instructions that explain how to do in-house distribution of a MonoTouch application.

Eight Reasons C# is the Best Language for Mobile Development: Xamarin CEO Nat Friedman describes some of the compelling technical advantages that make C# a great choice for modern mobile development.

Xamarin Developer Showdown winning entries showcase Xamarin.Mobile: We announced the winners of the Xamarin Developer Showdown, our first-ever mobile development contest. The blog post includes videos featuring all of the winning entries.

Android Tricks: Xamarin engineer Jeremie Laval wrote several excellent blog posts that demonstrate useful tricks for Android user interface development. Learn how to make expandable ListView elements, create a custom Android ImageView control that automatically applies animated transitions, and more.

From our forums

Displaying a PDF on iOS: Forum user CodeMonkey asked how to open and display a PDF on iOS. Responses in the discussion thread describe several different approaches, including opening the document in an external app, presenting it in a UIWebView, using mTouch-PDFReader, and using PSPDFKit with third-party MonoTouch bindings.

Cross-platform push notifications with PushSharp: Forum user Redth shared his cross-platform framework for using push notifications in Xamarin apps. It supports iOS, Mac OS X, Android, Windows Phone, and Windows 8. The source code is available from GitHub. Be sure to check out his Xamarin seminar on using PushSharp, which is also posted in the discussion thread.

Seminars

Xamarin seminars are awesomely instructive video presentations produced by skilled Xamarin experts. http://xamarin.com/seminars

Recent

MonoGame 3.0 (slides) (code) — Dominique Louis and Dean Ellis, core developers of the MonoGame project, discuss the latest goings on with MonoGame 3.0 and how the project has progressed over the past six months
Mobile Barcode Scanning (slides) (code) — An introduction to barcode scanning and how to integrate the feature into a Xamarin app with the ZXing.Net.Mobile library
MvvmCross (slides) (code) — An introduction to one approach for using dependency injection, unit testing and MVVM in cross-platform mobile C# development
Days Until Xmas: From Windows Phone to iOS to Windows 8 (slides) — Bringing a festive, holiday-themed Christmas countdown app to multiple platforms with Xamarin
Introduction to Xamarin.Mac (slides) — Xamarin CTO Miguel de Icaza gives a detailed introduction to writing native Mac apps in C# with Xamarin.Mac
Upcoming

Introduction to PassKit on January 24, 11AM EST with Craig Dunn
Around the web

MonoGame 3.0 Stable Released: MonoGame, the Open Source implementation of the Microsoft XNA 4.x Framework, now fully supports 3D and has enhanced XNA 4.x compatibility.

Property Finder – a Cross-Platform Xamarin MonoTouch Mobile App: Colin Eberhardt wrote a hands-on introduction to cross-platform development with Xamarin. He describes how he built a simple mobile app called Property Finder. Check out his PropertyCross project, which shows how his Xamarin-based Property Finder compares to implementations built with other frameworks.

How I Went From C# Developer to iPhone Developer in a Weekend: Rob Anderson wrote a blog post about his first experience with Xamarin. He learned how to use MonoTouch and built his first app–which one second place in a hackathon–in only one weekend.

How-to: Create an Android Support Package: Wally McClure explains how to overcome Android fragmentation by using Google’s Android support libraries in Mono for Android. The article demonstrates how to use the library’s Fragments implementation.

Xamarin Consulting Partners

We want to welcome our newest Xamarin Consulting Partners

Premier

AppGenie Development Technologies
Fino Consulting
Macaw
Microsec Ltd
Otimize
Matelli
Authorized

MMI Ventures
Orchard ebusiness Pty Ltd
Cayas
High Technology Group
Red Cell Innovation
New Apps

Spotlight

Spotlight Software has launched Spotlight People & Project Manager, a new cloud-based project management platform that emphasizes team communication. Rich social features, sophisticated task management, tight mobile integration, and advanced reporting features make Spotlight a compelling solution. Spotlight’s beautiful mobile client applications for iOS and Android were built with Xamarin. The developers were able to reuse 80% of their C# code between the Android and iOS clients. They estimate that using Xamarin reduced their development time by 25% on Android and 50% on the iPhone.

Legimi

Legimi is a subscription ebook service that provides readers with access to a wide body of content for a flat monthly fee, bringing the Netflix and Rdio content distribution model to reading. Legimi’s innovative service and interesting approach to content licensing were recently featured in an article on TechCrunch. The company’s iOS and Android apps, which allow subscribers to download and read books from the service, are built with Xamarin.

About Xamarin

Xamarin offers the best solution for cross-platform mobile development. Visit our website to learn how you can build rich, native mobile applications for Android and iOS with a shared C# code base. You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook.