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(Short) Book Review: Xamarin Mobile Application Development for Android

You probably read by now that I’ve been thinking of build either an Android application or a Chrome one as either companion or replacement for the glucometer utilities which I’ve been writing in Python for the past few months.

Packt has been nice enough to let me review Xamarin Mobile Application Development for Android, and so I decided to take into consideration the option of actually building the app in C#, so that it can be shared across various platforms.

The book goes into details of what Android applications can and should do and provides nice examples, mostly around a points-of-interst application. It’s hard to say much when I don’t want to complain, so I’ll just say, give it a go, if you don’t plan to make your apps open source (which I think you should). As the book points out, being able to share your backend libraries (but not frontend/UI ones!) across operating systems and platforms (phone, tablet, computer) is a godsend, so I think Xamarin did build a very good tool for the job.

On the other hand, I’m definitely not going to pursue this — while C# is a language I like, and Xamarin for Android allows you to use JNI extensions as the one Prolific releases for their USB-to-serial adapter, I find having the tool open source is more important than any of this.

Comments 3
  1. Nice, no I didn’t see that before! It’s definitely the kind of thing I want to look into — although as I said in a previous post my glucometer is not bluetooth-compatible, but I could try to build an adapter.

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