Build a Basic Android App with Xamarin and Visual Studio

Or maybe you have tried building native mobile apps with Android or iOS but didn’t like the languages? The .NET world has been blessed with Xamarin; a set of tools that lets you build mobile apps for Android, iOS, and Windows within Visual Studio. Today, mobile applications are widely used in our lives. A lot of people who develop software want to create mobile applications that are supported on different platforms.

To create the a carousel view, I just created a horizontal Stacklayout, wrapped in a horizontal scroll view. In the sample app, I will use Okta’s browser-based OpenID Connect flow to securely authenticate the user via the native browser installed on the device. Using an external browser is the most secure way to authenticate and allows you to log in automatically if you are already signed in the browser. Also, you won’t need to store the ‘client secret’` in your mobile app. When you log in, the browser will redirect you back to your Xamarin app using the redirect URI and pass the requested token as a parameter.

How to implement Carousel View in Xamarin.forms

With regards to the Minimum Android Version, this is something down to your personal choice as the developer. There is a trade-off here between being able to access the latest and greatest API features in newer versions and supporting your customers that have older versions. To help you make this decision, Google publishes platform version distribution data they collect as part of their Distribution dashboard on a fairly regular cadence. Note this version differs from the Target Android Version and that should always be set to the latest released SDK version, as anything less won’t be accepted into the Google Play store. Everyone describe that the best option is to go native. However this will take me a lot of time – I realize that it’s much less 2x for one app, but I’ll still have to dive in two different tech stacks and tools…

I don’t know a lot about Flutter, but it looks like people are using it to good effect. Because it’s a Google toolkit instead of MS, I suspect its build chain is probably not quite as robust, and the dev tools might not be as polished. That said, if a good bit of it is HTML/CSS you’ll have more brains to pick if your problem is in the UI part. A year or two ago I would have said don’t go near Xamarin, it was such a mess. It’s improved significantly since it moved into the .NET/Visual Studio org in Microsoft under Julia Liuson .

• I’m currently looking into whether I should use Xamarin or flutter, and I wonder if anyone here might have been in a similar situation and can share their experience.
• You can reach us directly at or you can also ask us on the forum.
• Xamarin.Forms is an abstraction on that, enabling developers to share the UI code as well.
• Because it’s a Google toolkit instead of MS, I suspect its build chain is probably not quite as robust, and the dev tools might not be as polished.
• Increasing the quality of mobile applications that became old but their developers want this company to make them more modern.
• If you want to create games, this platform isn’t the right idea for you.

The Okta service is OAuth 2.0 compliant and a certified OpenID Connect Provider, and so works perfectly with the AppAuth client SDK for all your authentication and authorization needs. Authentication is an important part of today’s mobile applications, but securely implementing authentication in a mobile app can be a daunting task. For example, your team may not be ready to develop mobile applications. You need to hire additional specialists that can create iOS and Android apps. The community of Xamarin users is great but small.

Note here I’ve written this is using the ‘default’ provider name. If you have a different provider, you’ll want to change this here. Also note that this is using the Android.Net flavour of the Uri class, and not the System version – you’ll need to add the former to your usings or fully qualify the type for this to work. The Scopes variable, like any other OpenID system, defines what we’re authorized to access.

What features does Xamarin have?

Never had too big infrastructure problems as well – full recompile takes around 5-10min sometimes, debugging is pain and sometimes iOS deployment on device stop working, but a mac restart fixes these. I’m currently looking into whether I should use Xamarin or flutter, and I wonder if anyone here might have been in a similar situation and can share their experience. Would you choose Xamarin again if you had to rebuild your app? Did you run into problems using flutter which made you change to Xamarin?

You can face some disadvantages of this development kit. Also, you can get access to Xamarin courses that you can complete on your own, as well as technical documents on the official Microsoft Learn platform. That’s why developers can always get technical support when they want to increase their qualifications. About ⅔ of all people on our planet use mobile devices. Progress collects the Personal Information set out in our Privacy Policy and the Supplemental Privacy notice for residents of California and other US States and uses it for the purposes stated in that policy.

Among all the disadvantages of this solution, you need to adapt your team of developers to using Xamarin in the work. Moreover, they have to study many additional subjects. For example, they need to learn the documentation, guidelines, SDK, and API of every platform. It is a very important part because Xamarin isn’t a universal solution.

When the user is authenticated you should redirect them to the next page of your experience. If you recall earlier each page is represented by an Activity, and so you need to create a new one now. As PerformAuthorizationRequest is synchronous and returns void, the code awaits upon the taskCompletionSource member, knowing it will only ever be set once a response has been retrieved. At this very same point you know the authorization state will be populated , and so you can return their values as part of the AuthorizationResult.

Identify the Best Layout to Use 🕵‍♂

Do this by enabling developer options and within the new menu, switching on ‘Android debugging’ under the ‘Debugging’ header. After this, just plug the device in, accept the dialog on your device confirming this is a safe debugging connection, and you should be able to deploy and run your app with F5. Note physical devices have higher precedence than the emulator and will switch to it as the default debugging option when plugged in. The configuration endpoint is a standard in OpenID as the discovery endpoint to find all that’s supported.

If you decide that you want to be removed from our mailing lists at any time, you can change your contact preferences by clicking here. Sometimes when we https://globalcloudteam.com/ have to create a UI, we “think while coding” and we do not employ a previous UI development process. But what are the consequences with this practice?

Xamarin is a framework from Microsoft for building cross-platform mobile apps from one shared source code, written in C#, and compiled to each platform’s runtime. Xamarin.Forms is an abstraction on that, enabling developers to share the UI code as well. Xamarin.Essentials is a NuGet package providing cross-platform APIs for accessing and using native platform capabilities. In this article I will show you how to build a simple Xamarin.Forms app and add authentication to it.

Xamarin.Essentials Auth Flow with an External Identity Provider

As a result, it was developed and successfully launched on iPhone and devices with Android as an operating system. You don’t need to spend a lot of time on one cycle. You just need to code only once and that’s it. You’d better launch your application faster for different systems. Moreover, you don’t need a lot of groups for creating this application. All the steps of this process become significantly easier if only one team works on this task.

I will use Okta to easily and securely implement user authentication so that I don’t have to implement it from scratch or roll my own identity management. Okta supports user authentication, multi-factor authentication, social authentication as well as all OpenID connect flows out of the box—so it can take care of all the scenarios you might ever need. “17.5 Preview 3 has the first preview version of our spell checker for code documents which will help folks identify misspelled words in comments, strings and identifiers for C#, C++ and Markdown files.” “When you create a new .NET MAUI application, it will use the new .NET MAUI workload and you will see true in the .csproj,” Microsoft said. “With this enabled all of .NET MAUI Essentials comes into your project! All you need to do is add using Microsoft.Maui.Essentials; and all of the APIs you know and love are at your fingertips.

I have only done very little with Xamarin and while everything worked as I wanted it to, it certainly was harder to get right compared to a similar prototype in flutter, so I’m unsure how to proceed. As far as I know, your resources have to be added to each platform. You cannot add them to the shared project/pcl and share them. In another project that this team worked on, they had to create an application for iOS and Android that could manage electronic locks in smart houses. Xamarin has successfully done this task without any problems. Then, testing of this application has been launched and now, the creators of it have become very rich.

It is very important to choose how to create your application because, despite the long list of advantages of this framework, nothing is ideal. More and more frameworks start to support cross-platform app development. It is a great framework that is why use xamarin for cross-platform development used for creating mobile applications that are compatible both with Android and iOS. Now, the popularity of it increases, and this tendency tends to be long-term. From this page add a name for your application and leave everything else as default.

Learn More About Xamarin, OpenID Connect, and Okta

The first block reads the token and retrieves the user’s name . In the second a new Intent is created for the dashboard activity, the user’s name is stored in this Intent using your above-defined extension method, and then the activity is started (i.e. navigated to). To prevent the user from navigating back to this page afterwards, the code ends by calling the Finish() method. When testing and running your app you have the choice of doing so with either an Android emulator running on your development machine, or by directly connecting to an existing Android device. There’s no right option here and different developers prefer different form factors.

Set Up Visual Studio and Your Environment

I tried using it last week for a quick app in my current job and I was impressed how much better and more stable it is, particularly the first-run experience. In my particular example, I needed to create an image gallery. I used the Camera control from the Xamarin.Labs project to get the image from either the camera roll or the camera itself. I then added this as a child to the Stacklayout. If we need to create this custom control in the xamarin.android or xamarin.iOS then what is the real benefits of using the Xamarin.forms where this simple requirements are not getting satisfied.

The real experience of work

A lot of advantages go together with this fact. If you do use Task.FromResult or Task.CompletedTask, you should also wrap your synchronous code in a try/catch and return Task.FromException if there is an exception. It’s expected that Task-returning methods will place exceptions on the returned task rather than throw them directly.

Specifically, the v1.7 release notes say, the team “Added ability to clear login information on iOS with PrefersEphemeralWebBrowserSession on the new WebAuthenticatorOptions class.” The open source .NET Multi-platform App UI is a cross-platform framework for creating native mobile and desktop apps with C# and XAML, described by Microsoft as the evolution of Xamarin.Forms. Key to that evolution is the addition of desktop development support in addition to support for traditional iOS and Android mobile apps. One of the clients of this company needed a solution that is two separate mobile applications for the work of two groups of users. Naturally, developing them needs huge spendings. That’s why the customer chose a cross-platform solution.

The reason is the increasing popularity of operating systems on smartphones. People use them for performing a connection to the internet and other tasks. Today, a business has to create its own mobile application if it is going to compete with other companies in this niche. With the sunsetting of Xamarin.Essentials, it will continue to be serviced through November 2022, but new features and APIs will only be added to .NET MAUI Essentials going forward.

Dimens.xml – As the name might imply, where you define set dimensions for your app’s layout. System.IdentityModel.Tokens.Jwt – The method of authentication here uses JSON Web Tokens. To extract the data needed from these tokens you’ll need this package. Xamarin.OpenId.AppAuth.Android – To Authenticate the user you will be using OpenID Connect standard (an enhancement of OAuth 2.0). Start by creating a new project and select the ‘Android App ’ master template . On the next page you’ll want to pick the ‘Single View App’ option as it is a great starter template to work from.