In my previous post I mentioned that I was looking at developing a cross platform, mobile application to schedule SMS messages.

Well I’m afraid that took a bit of a backseat for a couple of reasons.

Firstly I became aware that the action of sending a text message with no input from the user was not possible using iOS. While I have not investigated this fully it did make me pause for thought – what was the point of starting this cross-platform project if it was not going to work on the iPhone? Well, if the information I have is correct, there is no point …… unless I just demonstrate that writing apps for Android does not necessarily mean Java! So, this project is still on the cards – just not at the top of the deck.

xamarin certified badge The second reason for me not starting the development was that I have been studying via the Xamarin University and am happy to say that I am now Xamarin Mobile Certified :-).

The training took the form of a number of live web session presented by experienced Xamarin developers. Over the course of a couple of months I ‘attended’ many required sessions to allow me to sit the certification. This consisted of 150 questions which must be answered in under three hours. The pass mark was 80%. With my knowledge of iOS a little on the shaky side (being an Android user at heart) I was a bit hesitant about taking the full exam (I could have just taken the Android flavour) but I thought ‘what the hell’.

The exam did highlight to me that I need to do some more work on iOS but a pass is a pass and now that I have my evenings back I will be moving forward with the migration of the FillLPG application to Xamarin. Initially targeting Android but developed using all I have learnt to ensure that the maximum amount of code can be reused for an iOS version.

The code for FillLPG will unfortunately not be made available but I’m sure that there will be more than a blog post or three coming out of the development so stay tuned.