KYM PHILLPOTTSKYM PHILLPOTTS

Hiya everyone,

Hope you have had an amazing week. I've just got back from Seattle (which surprisingly had great weather) where I had a fun time at the Microsoft Campus, meeting people and geeking out. Now I'm back in Australia suffering a bit of jet-lag and not at all enjoying the Australian winter, but at least we have good coffee here ;-)

Have a relaxing weekend and enjoy all the amazing Xamarin community posts this week.

❤ Kym

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Introducing Allan Ritchie

If you have been around the Xamarin Community for a while you have undoubtedly heard of Allan Ritchie, he has created some of the "must-have" libraries for Xamarin projects. He is based in Toronto Canada, but his libraries are used all around the world.

Tell us a bit about yourself?

I'm a Microsoft MVP, former Xamarin MVP, new to the Twitch/Blog thing, author of several Xamarin open source projects (Acr.UserDialogs, Plugins.BluetoothLE, & Shiny to name a few), and founder of ACR Solutions.

Tell us one thing we probably don't know about you?

I live in Canada, but I absolutely HATE the cold, can't stake, and don't follow hockey at all! I also do an epic Yoda voice...yes!

How did you first get into Xamarin development?

I had written a couple of PhoneGap apps with Sencha Touch. It was awful. Moved into native development which took too long writing two apps. Started following monotouch just as Novell took over. Went to Xamarin Evolve, saw RX and other Xamarin xplat ideas for the first time. This was the greatest thing I had ever seen since I first figure out that pizza was awesome! After that, I wrote several large enterprise scale apps with it. Xamarin is truly the best cross platform platform around.

What has been the most enjoyable project you have built using Xamarin?

My most recent professional project requires the use of almost every single device hardware service on the mobile phone (BLE, sensors, gps, and more) and uses IOT, a ton of Azure services as well. There is more to UX than UI.

What advice would you give someone looking at getting started with Xamarin development?

Spend as much time on GitHub as possible. Learning the ecosystem is far more important than following a series of docs. Learn some frameworks and libraries for MVVM and general cross platform device access (cough... Shiny, Prism, RX)

What are the MUST HAVE tools, resources and libraries that you use when building Xamarin apps?

Where do you think mobile will be in 5 years?

Mobile development in the enterprise has been growing steady which will continue to rise over the next 5 years. I do think the industry will trend towards webassembly, but all of the great cross platform/xamarin/C# skills you possess today will all apply.

Any other things you would like to share or promote?

Please get in touch if you need help with any .NET project. Shiny is always looking for feedback and help - if you're interested in participating, head over to https://github.com/shinyorg/shinyorg

Stay up to date with all the great things that Allan produces:

Blog: https://allancritchie.net

Twitter: @allanritchie911

Github: aritchie

Twitch: allancritchie

Thanks again Allan, for sharing some information about yourself and creating amazing tools for the community!

Weekly Xamarin  

AND FINALLY...

Two Xamarin Monkeys (Glenn and Kym) visiting the Channel 9 studios. Happy days!

Weekly Xamarin