Wallace B. McClure

It isn't breaking news that social networks are a big deal to your users. But what's the best way to add that functionality in the cross-platform development world? One of the best ways is through Xamarin, which provides a set of components that allows developers to concentrate on high-level programming and solving user problems. This article will look at some technologies available in Android -- as well as the iPhone -- to add social features to applications. It serves as a companion to my April article that covered oAuth, Twitter and the Linq to Twitter library.

Navigation in mobile devices is an important consideration. If a user isn't able to navigate an app, he might quickly abandon it. Learn the navigation principles of Android to keep this from happening to you.

The following is a link to cross platform data access training with Xamarin & C#.   It is intended for use on iPhone, iPad, and Android devices.  The course covers local data in Sqlite, calling Web Services via REST and JSON, and calling Sql Server.

My training on Cross Platform Development with Xamarin w/ Portable Class Libraries and ASP.NET Razor Templating is now available online from Learn Now Online.  The url is: http://www.learnnowonline.com/course/cpx1/xamarin-cross-platform-pcl-and-razor

On the weekend of May 2-4, 2014, I attended the Atlanta Startup Weekend. I can't speak highly enough of the event.  Jen Bonnett runs a great event, provides a lot of great speakers and mentors.  I can't speak highly enough of her work and her event.  She has a number of people that help out as staff: Maria Joyner (she has to approve my Twitter bio), Dawn Law, Kiran Bindra, Michael Ames, Wanda, and Chris Schwartz. I've been to other start up events, but this will always be the gold standard.

Authentication has been a part of .NET for a long time. Unfortunately, there are a couple of problems:

One of the fun things about the return of golf season is participating in tournaments that feature events such as a longest drive contest. In these, a person’s first shot off a designated hole is measured against others in the tournament. The longest drive during the day is declared the winner. However, these contests typically don’t have centralized scoring. If you’re in the first group, you don’t know until after the event is over where your shots stand in relation to everyone else’s. Why not use a mobile phone to record the starting point and ending point of drives and store the information in a cloud-hosted database?

I was honored to have been on CodeCast Episode #2.  While there, I talked about my past, how I got into programming, and the decision tree that led me to use Xamarin's technologies.  After those discussions, I did a demo on oAuth authentication to Twitter via Xamarin.Auth and Xamarin.iOS (iPhone) and then showed the code for doing the exact same thing in Xamarin.Android (Android).  Hopefully, this is helpful to you as you look at, discussion, try, and do whatever on Xamarin's technologies.