Xamarin.Forms for Beginners

Want to build great native apps quickly? This session will give you an overview of the Xamarin.Forms API, controls, and toolset, as we illustrate how to quickly build native apps for iOS, Android, MacOS, tvOS, Samsung Tizen devices, and Windows in C# and XAML, while maximizing the amount of shared code between them. From concepts, to diving into code, this session aims to break down all barriers to getting started. Spoiler: if you know C# or XAML, you already know how to build great looking apps using Xamarin.Forms! More info here https://dotnet.microsoft.com/apps/xamarin/xamarin-forms

Have more FUN by Automating the Lifecycle of Your Apps with Visual Studio App Center

Visual Studio App Center is a the hub of “continuous everything” for your apps built for many different platforms: Build, UI test, distribute, see usage analytics and crash reports, and manage push notifications - all in one place. It supports apps built for mobile with swift/obj-c, java/kotlin, Xamarin, React Native, Cordova as well as apps for Windows, macOS, Unity, and tvOS. We’ll dive deep into the features, see App Center in action on a mobile app, and most importantly, show how you can use App Center to release more frequently, with higher quality, and have more FUN by spending time on coding features instead of managing overhead.

I've given this talk twice so far at these events:
1/18/18: MNEM Meetup
3/21/18: Twin Cities Code Camp

Latest slides and relevant code is here: https://github.com/TomSoderling/VSAppCenter

Bluetooth Low Energy for Xamarin Developers

There are a lot of wireless protocols out there for engineers and product designers to use, but what makes Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) so interesting is that it's almost certainly the easiest way to design something that can talk to any modern mobile platform out there. BLE is a light-weight subset of classic Bluetooth and was introduced as part of the Bluetooth 4.0 core specification. In this session, we’ll learn about the building blocks of BLE and dive into code to see how to communicate with peripheral devices from a Xamarin.Forms app

Building a Backend for Your Mobile Apps with Visual Studio App Center

At the Microsoft Build conference last year, the Visual Studio App Center team announced two new services that make up the beginning of their new Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaas) offering, empowering developers to build apps faster without the need for managing backend infrastructure.
We'll take a tour of VS App Center, dive deep into these new Data & Authentication services, and roll up our sleeves by learning how to get your own backend up and running and securely communicating with a sample cloud-connected Xamarin.Forms app for iOS and Android. Come see how VS App Center lives up to their motto, "make app development 10x easier".

Presented at the MN Developers Conference, Oct 2019 (https://mdc.ilmservice.com) & will be presenting at MN Enterprise Mobile meetup Jan, 2020 (https://www.meetup.com/Minnesota-Enterprise-Mobile/)

Sample app for talk and slides: https://github.com/TomSoderling/AppCenterMBaaSDemo

Faster app development by breaking the endless build-debug-tweak loop

As programmers, we're accustomed to spending much of our development time waiting. Waiting for the app to build, waiting for it to launch on debug, and waiting all over again when we realize we need to make a code change. What if there were a better way?
In this session we'll take a deep dive into some of the leading live preview development tools and explore how they can help free us from waiting and help make us more productive app developers.