Can I use Firebase for creating Windows app? - windows

I need create some Windows app with Firebase, but I can't choose a programming environment for Windows app. Which ones support FireBase?

Firebase does not have SDKs that directly support building apps that can be deployed on Windows.
The closest I can think of:
The Firebase SDKs for C++ and Unity can deploy to Windows desktop, but that is explicitly only intended for development. So you can develop and test your mobile game on Windows.
There is some movement on adding Windows support to the FlutterFire binding library, but it seems very early going.
Outside of these: the REST APIs for Firebase are all platform agnostic, so can be called from anywhere. There are quite some third party libraries that wrap these REST APIs, so I recommend doing a search for your combination.
Also see:
Firebase for Unity3d Windows application
Is it possible to use any kind of database in Flutter Desktop

Flutter & Firebase
Flutter Fire
Flutter Fire is the official Firebase SDK for Flutter and has incredible documentation, helpful videos and tutorials. The integration is seamless since both tools are built by Google. The maintainer of FlutterFire has created FlutterFire_Desktop which I believe may be a solution for you once its fully built out.
Flutter
Flutter is a UI framework which uses the Dart language (also built by Google) to allow developers to build one app and deploy everywhere.
Dart can compile to x86_64; ARM64 and Javascript - Ideally you can write one codebase for Windows, Mac, IOS/Android and Web. Dart also has a built in package manager and open sourced community through Pub.Dev which may have more workarounds for you.
C++ SDK
As of the latest Firebase Summit , they have recently added more support for their C++ SDK although I'm not entirely sure how it would integrate or if it integrates into windows desktop applications at all.

Related

Xamarin iOS GUI

We've been developing a cross-platform app in Xamarin on Windows and now we are moving to make GUI for iOS counterpart.
If I'm understanding correctly we need to switch to Visual Studio for MAC, on a MAC machine, and continue our GUI development there.
Is it possible to develop everything on Windows and just publish an app on the MAC machine?
How do we include the logic and everything from the android app?
You can use Xamarin.Forms to develop UI for both Android and iOS.
But if its already native then you can still continue developing it in Windows.
For the build and testing you definitely need a MAC, if you don't want to use a VM then you can build it on the cloud using a https://www.macincloud.com/ or other party that uses the same service, and use a simulator on windows.
If its cross platform then I assume you're using a .NET Standard for the shared codebase. So there would be no problem using the same logic for both the Android and iOS.
It is up to you. Many apps will work by just publishing on the Mac. Of those many will have some artifacts that shouldn't be in the end version.
To simplify it is like asking whether you should publish the app without testing and fixing. In 99% no, but sometimes it may work.

React Native newbie

I want to build a game with React Native. I am doing my testing locally on a personal Android device using the Expo app but ideally would love for the app to be cross platform. I do want to release it to a public store or have it be available for folks to play in some format.
Is it OK if I am using Visual Studio Code (on a Windows machine) to build my app, using node.js command line to run expo commands and testing with live reloading on my Expo app? Do I need to have a Mac + XCode if I want to edit iOS code?
What is the typical development process/toolset used?
React Native IS cross-platform, building the apps for production on different platforms, however, requires a different procedure. What makes it cross platform is that you write the source codes including all of the components (Well most of them) one time, and it automatically generates the native codes for Android and IOS.
There's no typical toolset for writing code, you can use any code editor you prefer (I use Sublime for example), but you should have the needed requirements listed in the getting started page in the official official docs including node.js.
Expo helps in testing the app on both android and ios without the need of a Mac (it has some other cool features too!). So if you want to release to apple store, you'll definitely need a mac (or a virtual machine running MacOS like VMWare)
In order to generate the release apk for android: Android Release APK
and for IOS: IOS

Can you publish a Windows 10 (Universal) app from PhoneGap on Mac?

I am looking to develop a Windows 10 Universal app based in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for use on Microsoft Surface tablets primarily. I have found information that says it can be done on this page, but at the very bottom of the page it says it is in beta. However, I can't seem to find anything more than that post. No updates, or documentation or anything. Does anyone know if you can do this from the PhoneGap app on Mac OS?
If not, I guess the next best option it to do it on a Windows machine using Visual Studio 2017 and Cordova?
Any information anyone has on this subject would be helpful.
Thanks!
No, I am pretty sure you can't build UWP apps on macOS. The reason is quite similar as the reason you cannot build iOS apps on Windows - you could build the JS portion of your code, but the problem is the fact that UWP build tools and SDKs are OS specific and unless Microsoft specifically ports them to macOS, they cannot work there.
You could use Parallels and run Windows as second OS, or use a build server to build the app in the cloud. Visual Studio App Center is a very good solution for you purpose as it allows you to configure a full build pipeline including UWP, iOS and Android builds.
You can actually develop a UWP app using phoneGap on Mac if you are building it using web technologies. (HTML, CSS, Javascript) But you can not build/publish the app on Mac, but if you have a Creative Cloud account, you can use Phone Gap Build to upload it to the service and have it built there.

Is it possible to develop a desktop application, which will be supported in both Mac and Windows, using Xamarin in Visual Studio?

Our team would like to develop an application in Visual studio and Xamarin. The app needs to be supported in both Mac and Windows. We prefer Xamarin because the back end code can be shared. If possible, how to build and publish it so that it can be only installed in the machines. We are not planning to submit this app to the corresponding app stores.
You can write and Windows Application with C# using WinForms, WPF, WinRT (Windows Store apps).
Also you can write Mac application with C# using Xamarin.Mac.
To share the code between Windows App and Mac App, you just need to split your code into shareable Business Logic (part) and specific UI part.
To share the code, just use PCL libraries.
Yes.
The core business logic can be written in shared code usable on both platforms.
You have a couple of choices of how to develop the UI. You can use native or Xamarin Forms.
If you use native then I would suggest using the MVVM pattern with a framework like MvvmCross. You can then write the bulk of your app in shared code and just write the UI in platform-specific code, with the windows UI written as a standard windows WPF or UWP app, and the Mac app written using Xamarin.Mac using the native Mac API.
If you want to use Forms then you may have to compile the binaries yourself to get Mac support as it won't be available till roughly May 2017, but you could get started building a Forms app for UWP/Windows now and add the Mac project once it is available.

Developing for tablets using Phonegap

i'm starting development with phonegap for tablets and need to clarify some issues.
1) as i understood, i can work in any IDE: Visual Studio, Idea, XCode. All what i need from IDE is emulator to test some specific things, for example interacting with file system, or making JSONP requests to some site's API. Is this true?
2) after developing of application for one single platform, i can take the 'www' folder and build it for other platforms using PhoneGap Build, isn't it?
3) is there any way to emulate tablet in visual studio?
1) You need the IDEs for target-platform-specific coding. If you want to make a PhoneGap plugin for Windows Phone, you'd use Visual Studio for the native part. If it were a plugin for iOS, you'd use Xcode.
If you don't want to use PhoneGap Build, you can also build packages for the target platforms using the respective IDEs.
IDEs are also the primary way to test your application, since you can't easily test
features specific to a mobile device in your browser. If you have the SDKs for your target platforms installed, the respective IDEs should feature a way to run an emulator. You will probably have to set up a project for your app, according to the instructions here.
2) Generally, your application should run on any supported platform, as long as you stick to the PhoneGap API. Some features might behave differently on different platforms, so you'll still have to test throroughly on all platforms you indend to support.
3) If you install the Windows Phone SDK, you can use an emulator. There is some information on what the emulator is capable of on MSDN.

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