- Xamarin Visual Studio
- Xamarin Studio For Windows
- Xamarin Studio Community Edition Download
- Visual Studio Xamarin Tutorial
At0002//build 20160002conference, Microsoft0002announced to include Xamarin into their existing offers and make the cross-platform solution free for everyone. Now as0002Xamarin is part of Visual Studio 2015, some things are changing for developers so let's take a look at what how the Xamarin ecosystem will transform.
Step 1 Open Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition then go to File - New - Project click on Project. Now, a new window will open in that window under installed select Visual C# - Cross -Platform. Now, select Cross Platform App (Xamarin), now give the name of the project and set the location for that folder and then click OK. Xamarin can be installed as part of a new Visual Studio 2019 installation, with the following steps: Download Visual Studio 2019 Community, Visual Studio Professional, or Visual Studio Enterprise from the Visual Studio page (download links are provided at the bottom). Double-click the downloaded package to start installation. Trusted Windows (PC) download Xamarin Studio 5.7.2.7. Virus-free and 100% clean download. Get Xamarin Studio alternative downloads.
TL;DR: Yes, Xamarin is free. Or at least free of charge for everyone who is elightable for the for the0002free Visual Studio Community edition or a subscriber of one of the Visual Studio MSDN plans.
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On Windows, Visual Studio is your choice now so that Xamarin Studio will disappear here but will still be the IDE to work with when using a Mac. Here you will also have access to a free Community edition and a paid Business one, that comes with a Visual Studio subscription and offers additional business features like the superior Visual Studio versions on Windows do. Detailed0002feature0002comparision here
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Oh, and did it mention that Xamarin is open source now?
Pricing
First of all: Yes, it's true! Xamarin is available ****free of charge0002now for almost everyone0002due to it is not only included into the charged versions of Visual Studio but also into the free Community Edition. The latter has some limitations regarding the commercial usage but might be the right choice for independent developers and small teams.
Of course there are some benefits for paid users that are subscribing the Visual Studio Professional or Enterprise plans. Those have access to the technical support, might get special account for Xamarin University or get access to some special features like the Profiler0002or0002Test Recorder IDE add-ins.0002But the core of Xamarin development is fully included and not restricted in the free subscription. So if you don't need premium features – no costs for you! Head over to the regarding Xamarin page0002if you need more detailed information.
What about Xamarin Studio?
Yes, I know: Visual Studio everywhere. But what if you are working on a Mac? Bad news first: We won't see a Mac Version of Visual Studio in the near future. Xamarin Studio is still the way to go, when developing cross-plattform applications in C# on an Apple machine.
Xamarin Studio will retire on Windows due to there is no need for it anymore. You can and should use the free Visual Studio Community edition here. Xamarin Studio will be continued on the Mac only and will be split into two versions: The Community edition will have the same license terms as its Visual Studio brother on Windows and will be the right choice for indie developers, students and small teams. The Xamarin Studio Business edition will have all the features of the Community edition, plus some of the business features that the superior Visual Studio editions will offer. So if you have an existing Visual Studio Professional or Enterprise subscription, you will get Xamarin Studio automatically, if not, stay with the free version.
Additionally, Xamarin Studio is getting some new and advanced features like the ability to read and open UWP projects. Yep sorry, just read and open, no UWP compilation on a Mac at the moment. But hey, it's a first step in the right direction!
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How can I get Xamarin now?
When you start the Visual Studio installer right now, you can opt-in an installation of Xamarin as one of the features to be installed. Of course you can always add Xamarin to your Visual Studio installation later by re-running the installer or via a dedicated installer. On the Mac you can download Xamarin from the Dashboard on the website. When logging into Xamarin Studio the first time, it decides whether it becomes a Community or Business edition, depending on the Visual Studio subscription that is connected with your account.
Open source
Additionally they announced to give the Xamarin code the the community and contribute it to the0002.NET Foundation0002as an open source project that can be found on GitHub in the future.0002With these changes, .NET is now open source and native on every single device, from mobile to desktop to cloud. Of course also Xamarin.Forms is getting open sourced, too.
What about the other Xamarin products?
Over the years Xamarin created more than just a development framework. With several other products like Xamarin University, a high class learning platform or Xamarin Test Cloud, where developers can test their apps on thousands0002of physical devices they provided great tools for every mobile0002developer. Xamarin University will include new Microsoft focused lectures on the power of Azure and UWP as well as continuing to offer a first class learning environment for mobile developers.0002Xamarin Insights, a telemetry framework will join Microsoft's HockeyApp. Test Cloud will be0002continued to provide it0002as a standalone product, where Microsoft0002will be investing heavily in its future. 0002The official Xamarin Developer Certification will also continue to exist in the future.
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I personally really like what's happing with Xamarin at the moment. I love how Microsoft does not devour it completely but tries to keep the brand alive. Together with Microsoft, they can now offer Xamarin for free and who knows, maybe writing cross-platform applications using C# might be the most normal thing in the future.
Chuck Norris could easily make a single app run on all of the platforms iOS, Android, and Windows - without any frameworks or tools. Most of the rest of us could probably do with some help.
Happily, Xamarin Forms is the perfect tool for the job, and makes it a breeze to create an app! With Xamarin Forms your app will run on all three platforms from a single codebase. Xamarin Forms comes free with Visual Studio 2019 community edition from Microsoft. Let's try it out - and have some fun. We'll make a simple app that fetches Chuck Norris facts and collects your favorites.
This post will use these tools, libraries, and services:
- Visual Studio 2019 community edition
- Xamarin.Forms
- RestSharp - for REST calls
- Chuck Norris facts API at
https://api.chucknorris.io/ - System.IdentityModel.Tokens.Jwt
Start by downloading Visual Studio 2019 community edition from visualstudio.microsoft.com. Make sure to check the boxes 'Mobile development' and 'Universal Windows Platform development' during the installation process:
If you forget, no problem! Just open 'Visual Studio Installer' from your start menu, select Modify and then you are back at the screen where you can tick off the workloads you want.
When you continue, it will open the Windows Settings window to turn on developer mode. Make sure to turn it on (it's not defaulted).
You may also use Visual Studio 2017, but it would be wise to update it - to make sure you have the latest version of Xamarin.Forms. Start the Visual Studio installer and select Update if that is an option.
Scaffold Your Xamarin App for Secure Login
Start Visual Studio, select Create a new project, and select the template Mobile App (Xamarin.Forms) and then click Next:
Enter 'ChuckNorrisFacts' for Project name and then click the button Next.
Then check all platforms and select the template Blank:
Then you're in. Have a look around!
The Solution Explorer on the right contains four projects:
The first one is the only one you will work on. The others are for platform-specific code, and you may as well collapse them as I have done in the image above.
Notice that the last project, ChuckNorrisFacts.UWP (Universal Windows) is in bold text. This means that hitting F5 will run this as a Windows application. If you want to run the Android or iOS versions, you must right-click the project you want and then select Set as StartUp Project.
Now it's time to build a user interface for getting Chuck Norris facts! Right-click the project ChuckNorrisFacts, select Add and then New Item…. Select Xamarin.Forms to the left and Content View in the middle (not the one with C# in a parenthesis), and enter 'FactsView' in the Name field:
Click Add, and two new files will be created. FactsView.xaml is the view part of the component, declaring which components are included and their visual appearance, including layout. FactsView.xaml.cs is for C# and is called the code behind file.
Change the FactsView.xaml file's content to this:
The content of this view is a StackLayout, which by default lays out its content from top to bottom. In the first row is another StackLayout with Orientation='Horizontal', which means it lays out its content from left to right. Inside it, there are a combo box (which is called Picker in Xamarin.Forms) and three buttons.
The x:Name attribute gives a variable name to each component, which enables you to access them in the code behind file. You will see that soon.
The Clicked attribute tells which method be called when the button is clicked. The attribute Text specifies the text on the button.
Xamarin Visual Studio
The last two buttons are disabled, more about that later.
Run Your New Xamarin App
It is always wise to often test that everything is right. To actually see our FactsView, open MainPage.xaml and add right after the comment . Also, to make it build without errors, you need to add the click-handlers. Open FactsView.xaml.cs and add these methods to the class - we will finish them later:
Now you can run the application. Make sure the UWP project is set as the startup project, and enable developer mode in Windows settings if you have not done it already. Then press F5, and Visual Studio will build your solution and run it. Building it takes a while the first time. When started, it should look something like this:
The black thing in the center almost at the top is a debug tool. Click on it to expand it. If you run with CTRL+F5 instead of F5 alone, Visual Studio will run your app without debug mode and without this debug tool.
Make a REST Call in You Xamarin App
Next up is actually getting some Chuck Norris Facts! That's where Chuck Norris facts JSON API at https://api.chucknorris.io/ comes in handy. Go to https://api.chucknorris.io/jokes/random and you will get a random joke in JSON format.
You need to build a model class to parse this JSON. Let's do it the easy way. Copy the JSON of the random joke you got from the browser. Then add a new class, either by the shortcut Shift+Alt+C or by right-clicking the project ChuckNorrisFacts, selecting Add and then New Item…. Call the class Fact. Once it has been created, delete the classand the using statements so you are left with only this:
Place the cursor between the curly braces and go to the Edit menu in the top bar of Visual Studio. Select Paste Special and then Paste JSON as Classes. Visual Studio creates all the properties for you! Change the name of the class back to Fact, and it should now look like this:
Now you will add some NuGet packages to do REST calls and parse JSON. Go to the Tools menu at the top bar of Visual Studio. Select NuGet Package Manager and then Manager NuGet Packages for Solution. Install RestSharp and Newtonsoft.JSON into the main project, ChuckNorrisFacts.
Now you can finish FactsView.xaml.cs. Add these two using-statements at the top:
Add the two object variables from the code below to FactsView.xaml.cs - and also the initialization code at the end of the constructor:
Each user has its own favorites list for saving his or her favorite Chuck Norris Facts in-memory. The Dictionary maps a username to the correct List. is, and the read-only property Favorite does this for the current username. _client is for an object that will help us to do REST calls.
In the constructor, the list will be initialized with options to the Picker. The first option is to have a random fact, and the rest are the categories you will fetch from https://api.chucknorris.io/jokes/categories with a REST call.
Next, replace GetFactClicked with this:
You will make a method GetFact() that can take a category name as a parameter and get a fact in that category - or get a random fact if no category is provided.
To make GetFact() and GetCategories() actually work, add this:
The last one is a helper method which gets a URL as a parameter, does the REST call, and converts the result to data type T. To make this as general as possible, you use generics, that's the in Get and it lets you call this method with whatever class you want.
GetCategories() simply calls the helper method with the correct URL ending - and asks for the results to be interpreted as a string array.
GetFact() does something similar. If a category is set, it adds it to the URL the way that the Chuck Norris API wants it. And it wants the result as an object of the class you made earlier, Fact.
The logic for favorites simply works with the in-memory list. Add their implementations:
AddFavoriteClicked() will add the current fact to the favorites list. GetFavoriteClicked() will show a random favorite. If the list is empty, it lets the user know there are no favorites yet.
But wait - those buttons are disabled! Sure, you can enable them, but you don't want users to see anything other than their own favorites. So you need a way to ensure that the user is who he or she claims to be.
Add Login to Your Xamarin App
No reason to write the authentication yourself. You can easily integrate Okta to handle the authentication for you and easily:
- Authenticate and authorize your users
- Store data about your users
- Perform password-based and social login
- Secure your application with multi-factor authentication
- And much more! Check out our product documentation
Sign up for a forever-free developer account (or login if you already have one). Once you have signed up and logged in, you'll be taken to your dashboard. Make note of your Org URL in the top right corner.
Next, you will create an application. Select Applications in the menu bar, and then Add Application. Select Native and then Next. Enter Chuck Norris Facts for Name, check Implicit (Hybrid), and click Done.
Go back to Visual Studio, and create a new login component. Right-click the project ChuckNorrisFacts, select Add and then New Item…. Select Xamarin.Forms to the left and Content View in the middle, and enter 'LoginView' in the Name field. Click Add.
Open LoginView.xaml and change its content to this:
So you have made a login panel and a logout panel. Only one of them will be visible at a time. The login panel has a button for logging in and a label to show a message if the login fails. The logout panel only shows a label and a button to log out.
You will make LoginView fire an event when the user has logged in. FactsView will listen to and react to this event. Open LoginView.xaml.cs and add the following line to the class:
Now install version 5.4.0 of the System.IdentityModel.Tokens.Jwt NuGet package in the main project, and add this using statement at the top of LoginView.xaml.cs:
Xamarin Studio For Windows
Then add this method to handle a click on the login button:
The actual login process is handled in a separate class LoginProvider. It will have its own implementation on each of the platforms iOS, Android and Windows. This text describes how to implement it for Windows, and at the bottom of this article, there will be a link to another article about how it is implemented in iOS and Android.
Add a new interface ILoginProvider that will be implemented by LoginProvider. It will only contain one method:
The method LoginClicked first gets an object of a class that implements ILoginProvider. It does so with the DependencyService, which is a part of the Xamarin.Forms framework that allows apps to call into platform-specific functionality from shared code.
You will now add an implementation of this for the UWP project and register it with the DependencyService. Add a new class LoginProvider to the UWP project and replace its content with this:
There is no need to explain everything that goes on in this code, but it implements the auth code flow with PKCE and redirect. That means it will open a modal popup with a login form hosted by Okta. If the login is successful, Okta will redirect this browser to a special callback URI that the WebAuthenticationBroker will pick up. The URI will contain the id token for the user. WebAuthenticationBroker will close to browser popup and return this value inside result.Data. The code then extracts and returns the id token.
There is one important thing you must do to make this work. In the Okta dashboard, you must register the callback URI, or else it will not work. Set a breakpoint at the code line below, and use the debugger to get the value of absoluteUri:
Go to the app you created in the Okta dashboard. Select Edit to the right of the box General Settings. Then click Add URI to the right of Login redirect URIs. Paste in the value of absoluteURI (it should look something like this: ms-app://s-1-15-2-1887544707-1408717265-2456949125-1910559573-2904915393-20160902-2550841693/) and click Save.
You must get your client app id from the Okta dashboard and enter it in the first line of the method. Select Applications in the menu bar. Select your app. Select the tab General. Scroll down and find Client ID. Click the button to the right to copy this value to the clipboard. Paste it into your code, so that it is assigned to the variable clientId. On the next line, make sure the URL starts with your specific Okta URL.
Go back to LoginView.xaml.cs in the main project. In the second line, it calls the implementation of LoginAsync and gets an id token back - or null if the login fails. If it gets an id token it will decode it using JwtSecurityTokenHandler and extract the username field. Then it fires an event, which we will later work on in FactsView. On success, it shows the logout panel and hides the login panel. If the login fails it shows an error message.
Also, add a method to handle logout:
It hides the logout panel, shows the login panel and fires the event.
Send Notifications in Your Xamarin App
To show LoginView and make the event work, open MainPage.xaml and change the content of the StackLayout to this:
The main page will have both a FactsView and a LoginView. The event will be handled by a method HandleLoginChanged. Open MainPage.xaml.cs and add this:
When the event occurs this code just passes it on to FactsView. Open FactsView.xaml.cs and add this:
Xamarin Studio Community Edition Download
It will enable or disable to favorite buttons depending on if you are logged in or not. And it will add a new list to the Dictionary Write image to flash. for this user if it does not exist.
Visual Studio Xamarin Tutorial
Now run the app with CTRL-F5 or F5 and start collecting your favorite Chuck Norris Facts! The first time you log in with a new user, Okta will ask you to register a security question.
Learn More About Xamarin and Secure Login in .NET
I hope you enjoyed this tutorial, for iOS and Android use cases, please check out this post:
To learn more about authentication, OpenID Connect, and Okta, we encourage you to check out the following resources from our developer blog:
- Our OpenID Connect Primer in three parts:
