iOS Limitations and Xamarin Mobile Certification

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.

Getting Started with Xamarin – a Pet Project

In previous posts I have mentioned that 2014 will be my ‘Year of the Mobile‘ and that Xamarin (which will allow me to develop for Android, iOS and Windows Phone using C#) will be my weapon of choice.

As with all undertakings such as this I needed a few pet projects to work on, something that more closely resembles a real world application than some contrived examples that you find in some books and web tutorials (that’s not to say that all book and web tutorials are created equally).

Website Outage

The website was offline for a few hours this morning due to a power outage at Fasthosts – who are the current registrars for the onthefencedevelopment domain. I say ‘current’ registrars because while the outage was due to circumstances beyond their control the fact that it took ALL of their systems offline is cause for concern.

2014 – The Year of the Mobile?

I’ve always said that when it comes to software development, you have to “pick your fights” – it’s just not possible to keep up with the ever-changing technologies. We only have so much time to spend learning new technologies and techniques so it is important to carefully consider what to focus on and what to let pass us by.

When it comes to Mobile development I have released a simple, native, Android app which was written using my somewhat rusty Java skills. At the time of writing the app is installed on around 5000 devices (if Google Play is to be believed). Since it’s original release I have addressed bugs and added a few requested features but I found it to be a bit of a struggle due to Java not being my main development language – but I simply don’t have time to bring my Java skills up to the required level. As for iPhone/iPad development I have joked that “I don’t have enough time left in my life to learn Objective C “.

Looking forward – building Android apps using C#

So, mobile is where it’s at, or at least that’s what we are told and there is plenty of evidence to back it up. I know from how much I use my Android phone and how much I rely on it that it is a development platform that can’t be ignored. As you may or may not know I currently have an app in the Android Play Store and while it’s pretty simple in what it does it has had over 5000 downloads and has a rating of about 4.5 stars. But nothing in development stands still and it already looks dated, uses the old Google Maps API and contains a reasonable amount of code that I’m not happy with. The problem is that I’m a .NET developer and while I have developed with Java in the past it too has moved on and I constantly find myself Googling for solutions to problems I know how to address in C#. So when I saw that there was a tool that would allow me to write native Android applications using C# I thought – “What’s not to like?”.