We are excited to announce that Xamarin.Forms and Xamarin.Essentials now target Android 13! As of August 2023, new Android apps that are distributed through the Google Play Store will have to target at least Android 13. In a continued effort to keep supporting Xamarin.Forms, we have now updated Xamarin.Forms and Xamarin.Essentials to target MonoAndroid13 by default. Since this is a bigger update than usual, we are putting out this preview release first. .NET 7 and .NET MAUI already support Android 13. We encourage all new applications to begin with .NET MAUI since Xamarin support will end May ..read more

There has never been a better time to update & migrate your Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android apps to the latest version of .NET. The update process for most apps should be quick and when you are finished you will be able to take advantage of the latest features of .NET 7 including C# 11 and the new project system. In addition, iOS & Android apps built against .NET 6 and .NET 7 have large performance improvements and developer productivity features as they take advantage of build system enhancements. The team has just released upgrade documentation for apps, so go head over there for a f ..read more

Today we are happy to announce that Xamarin support is now available for iOS 16 in Visual Studio 17.3.5 on Windows and 17.3.6 on Mac. iOS 16 now joins Android 13 (API 33) in Xamarin to support the latest mobile versions on both platforms. iOS 16 is part of the larger Xcode 14 release from Apple which will soon also add new versions of iPadOS, tvOS, macOS, and Mac Catalyst. Apple has not yet released those updates, so your applications will continue to work using the existing versions of those SDKs. To get started today, install these versions of Visual Studio along with Xcode 14 on your Mac ..read more

Note: This is a Guest Blog Post by Michael Rumpler. Michael has been a freelance C# developer since 2003, switching from web to mobile in 2014 upon the introduction of Xamarin.Forms. Let’s first provide a brief introduction to the MR.Gestures Library to explain why it exists and the problem it solves. When Xamarin.Forms was released in 2014 it only provided TapGestureRecognizer which had to be added to a GestureRecognizers collection. This implementation was always a bit of a code-smell for me. It copied the iOS + Android APIs, but iOS and Android (at the time) only used that architecture be ..read more

Note: This is a Guest Blog Post by Microsoft MVP Luis Matos. Luis is a System Engineer who specializes in helping companies and professionals create value in their software products. If you are a Xamarin.Forms Library maintainer and haven’t yet ported your library to .NET MAUI, then you are in the right place! In this post, I will be sharing the tips that I learned porting my NuGet Package, Plugin.ValidationRules to support .NET MAUI. Refactor or Rewrite or Bifurcate? Your Xamarin.Forms SDK library is likely targeting .NET Standard, Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android. Some of your code may be r ..read more

Accessing 3rd party libraries directly from C# is a great perk of developing mobile apps with .NET and Xamarin. You have the ability to create your very own binding projects, consume NuGets from the community, or leverage binding packages contributed to by our teams. We have been hard at work to kick off the new year with several updates for popular libraries. The first of which is v12.2.0 of the Facebook SDK for iOS. This update brings together several SDK components from Facebook including CoreKit, LoginKit, ShareKit, GamingServiceKit, and AudienceNetwork. Open Source & Issue Reporting W ..read more

Machine learning can be used to add smart capabilities to mobile applications and enhance the user experience. There are situations where inferencing on-device is required or preferable over cloud-based solutions. Key drivers include: Availability: works when the device is offline Privacy: data can remain on the device Performance: on-device inferencing is often faster than sending data to the cloud for processing Cost efficiencies: on-device inferencing can be free and more efficient by reducing data transfers between device and cloud Android and iOS provide built-in capabilities for on-dev ..read more

A critical part of developing apps is laying out the various elements on the screen, both in design and in code. It is crucial that the content ordering is meaningful. Without meaningful, logical ordering, drastically varying in-app experiences get delivered to the wide range of app users. Meaningful ordering is a key aspect of developing accessible apps. Meaningful content ordering The first step towards approaching meaningful content ordering is understanding what exactly makes content ordering “meaningful”. A great place to start is with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Acc ..read more

This week .NET Conf 2021 is celebrating the release of .NET 6, Visual Studio 2022 is now available, and we are happy to announce that Visual Studio 2022 also includes Xamarin support for Android 12, Apple’s latest Xcode 13 releases of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and tvOS, and the latest Xamarin.Forms service releases that work with both. Let’s round up the latest Xamarin releases available today, revisit the Xamarin support policy, and look ahead at the road to .NET 6 and .NET MAUI coming in the second quarter of 2022. .NET 6 is GA today and .NET Muti-platform App UI (MAUI) support is on the way for ..read more

Note: This is a follow to last month’s announcement: The Future of Xamarin Community Toolkit The Xamarin Community Toolkit team is excited to announce two new .NET MAUI-compatible versions of the toolkit: Xamarin.CommunityToolkit.MauiCompat Xamarin.CommunityToolkit.Markup.MauiCompat These MauiCompat libraries align to latest release of Xamarin.CommunityToolkit; the main difference being that these are for your .NET MAUI apps, whereas Xamarin.CommunityToolkit is for your Xamrain.Forms apps. Today’s MauiCompat release includes support for iOS and Android. Future MauiCompat releases will incl ..read more