Build a Cross-Platform, Mobile Golf App Using C# and Xamarin - MSDN Magazine Article

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?

The options for building such an app are many, which can be confusing. In this article, I’ll walk through how I built such an app using the back-end options in Windows Azure and how I handled various issues. I’ll show the code for writing an app for Windows Phone as well as iOS using Xamarin.

Several features were required. The app needed to run across mobile devices and multiple device OSes. It had to be a native app that looked just like all of the others on a device. The back-end server had to be always available, with minimal hassle to the developer (me). The cloud services had to provide as much help as possible in the area of cross-platform development. The back-end database needed to provide some amount of geolocation functionality.

Url: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dn630648.aspx

Many thanks to Brian Prince, Kevin Darty, Tara Walker, Craig Dunn, and a host of others for reviewing the article

PS. You don't have to go to Build to get this Cross Platform Awesomeness