The Xamarin.Forms excitement continues to build, getting broad third party support and more...

Like I said here, Cool Preview eBook of the Day: "Creating Mobile Apps with Xamarin.Forms" by Charles Petzold (Yes, that one), Xamrin.Forms is generating allot of excitement in the .NET/Xaml space and the excitement continues to build with the announcement of top tier third party support. Infragistics and Syncfusion both just announced support for Xamarin.Forms, among other top tier vendors, Enterprise Component Vendors Join Xamarin.Forms Ecosystem. Heck, even Microsoft is getting into the game!

Infragistics - Announcing Infragistics Xamarin.Forms!

I am very excited to announce a new partnership with Xamarin and our newest product release to compliment our Native Mobile story with Visual Studio – Infragistics Xamarin.Forms.

Over the last few years we have invested heavily in the native UI controls - we have an iOS control set, Android control set and Windows Phone control set. Up until now, the target developer for these control sets were your objective-C, Java or Windows Developer. Now with Infragistics Xamarin.Forms, the market is super-expanded - any Visual Studio, C#, XAML Developer can now write once, a single codebase, and then take our new Xamarin.Forms product with Xamarin’s product and ship native apps that target each major platform in no time..

There are a ton of reasons why this is so exciting, but from a pure cost perspective, using the technology from Infragistics & Xamarin, a company does not need to invest in the training and time loss of learning a new platform – using current C# & XAML skillsets native apps can be churned out in no time compared to building a native experience from scratch on each major mobile platform. Add the long-term maintenance costs of bug fixes, feature changes, UI updates and more, and you are looking at a significant cost savings if you have a single code base to maintain while still having the benefit of native apps on each major platform. Pretty cool!

So what exactly are we shipping today?

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Syncfusion - Essential Studio for Xamarin has Arrived

As part of our participation in the Xamarin Evolve 2014 conference this week, Syncfusion is excited to reveal a new control suite for cross-platform mobile development: Essential Studio for Xamarin. We’ve incorporated some of your favorite data visualization and file-format components from Syncfusion with Xamarin.Forms, an API that enables developers to use a single C# codebase to build UIs for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone apps.

Native apps built with Essential Studio for Xamarin

Essential Studio for Xamarin is MVVM-compatible and includes a total of six Syncfusion controls. The Chart, TreeMap, and Gauge UI tools provide enterprise-grade processing and interactive visualization for your business data. File-format APIs XlsIO, DocIO, and PDF allow users to easily read, write, and edit Excel, Word, and PDF files on any device.

With Essential Studio for Xamarin, you can:

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Multilingual App Toolkit's blog - MAT v4.0 Technical Preview adds Xamarin support

The Multilingual App Toolkit v4.0 Technical Preview adds support for VS + Xamarin based iOS and Android projects. We are super excited (just had to say it) about adding MAT’s localization workflow for developers using Visual Studio and Xamarin to create great cross-platform apps! You can download it here

I am fortunate enough to be in attendance at Xamarin Evolve 2014 this week. On Monday I attended a training session presented by Craig Dunn on Xamarin localization. Craig did a great job covering localization in general, then focused on iOS and Android projects specifics as well as RESX with Xamarin Forms. Craig’s demo code is available on GitHub. So of course I wanted to see how the v4.0 technical preview would handle the code. The demo is pre-populated with the target RESX files, so I simply removed them before using MAT v4.0 preview to add Japanese (JA) and Arabic (AR). After generating translating using the default translation providers. As you can tell from the images below everything worked as expected.

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