Difference between UWP and Xamarin's UWP? - xamarin

I was trying to learn basics of xamarin. I came across Adding a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) App and I was trying to figure out advantages of using it over normal UWA with PCL or Shared projects. Is it different from UWP, or does it offers more support from portability?

Xamarin Forms helps dev code once and deploy on cross-platforms.
For front end, there are bit different when you code UWP and Xamarin Forms. stackpanel and stacklayout these kind of UI element. MS is working on XAML standard 1.0 so in future we only have one XAML need to remember.
If you are working on windows 10 app, highly recommended using UWP. There are more docs you can read.
Lot of people using Xamarin Forms to create Android iOS cross-platform apps, and devs lost interesting in support xamarin forms plugins for UWP.

does it offers more support from portability
Yes, or rather I should say that portability is the only practical reason you want to use Xamarin (aside from you being familiar with the platform and not wanting to learn something new, but this seems not to be the case).
Is it different from UWP
As far as I know, Xamarin's UWP is just a UWP project included inside a Xamarin project, so it's basically the same thing.

The answer is: NO
No performance issues
No developing issues
Everything was converted down to the same assembly and run as you expected
However, if you just do mainly in UWP. I suggest not doing it on Xamarin, because the support of new toys come a little bit slower on Xamarin. Right now the communities are waiting for XamlUI Alpha

Related

How to print from Xamarin application?

Is it possible to print from a xamarin application to a pos printer?
I search in xamarin docs about printing but i only found a microsoft UWP sample. Is this for xamarin development also? Probably i miss something so can anyone guide me how to print from a xamarin application silently to a ECS/POS printer?
Xamarin supports .NET Core technology. Xamarin.Forms is the user interface technology. Printing is something that is not covered with either of those.
You can print with Xamarin.Forms as each platform (iOS, Android, UWP etc) supports printing and Xamarin supports 100% of APIs of each platform, however you need to write the code separately, for example for UWP you can use the link you found above, but it will work only on UWP.

Can I create an Android app using Xamarin only

I'm a Windows developer and have written all sorts of windows client applications using C++ and C#. I wanted to write an Android app and put it on the Google Store, but I'm only equipped with Visual Studio.
I wanted to ask if it is realistic to think that I can create an app, from scratch, including engine and UI using Xamarin only. I saw there are a few Xamarin samples out there, but I didn't want to start only to find out that it's not enough for some reason.
Currently I'm struggling a bit in getting my environment right, but thought I'd throw this question here to you guys ... Maybe it's not even worth starting?
Thanks.
Yes, Xamarin can be used to develop Android apps from scratch. Xamarin has two main libraries that help with this.
Xamarin.Android will give you access to all the Android APIs directly from c#. Note that you still need to know the basic Android concepts like what is an Activity and an Intent.
The other library is Xamarin.Forms. It is a cross-platform library that will give you a basic set of UI controls and widgets that you declare usong an xml syntax, and program with C#. This library has a few limitations, but you can also use the features of Xamarin.Android alongside it to get at the missing features.
Some advice: if possible, develop and debug directly on an Android tablet. Android emulators are not that good and hard to configure. Hope this helps.
There are 2 types of Xamarin you can use.
Xamarin Forms : Which is the unified version that use XAML for the UI. It is very recommended to use this if you are building a simple application.
Xamarin Native : The "native" version of platform that are written in C#, if you want to create Android-only apps, I really recommend this, since it's very similar with the native Android code, but it's wrapped using C# (You can still using nuget package).

Common solution for Xamarin.UWP and Xamarin.Mac

I have a quick question, it would be great if anyone can clear it out. I wanted to develop a cross-platform application for Window OS and Mac OS.
I search it out a lot and found that we can create Window app with UWP and Mac OS app with the help of Xamarin.Mac but in that case, we are having a different solution for both Windows and Mac platform. We need a common solution for both the platform.
I will really appreciate if anyone can clarify how we need to proceed with the Cross-Platform development of Windows and Mac.
The idea with xamarin is to separate UI and non UI code. You can share the non UI code between the UWP and Xamarin.Mac
Another approach is to use Xamarin.Forms which abstracts the UI code to be cross platform. The Xamarin.Forms implementation for Xamarin.Mac is stil in preview though

Xamarin or Xamarin.Forms for Android and classic Windows?

Is there a way to create a Xamarin or Xamarin.Forms solution that targets Android and classic Windows to produce a Windows 7,8,8.1,10 executable (exe)?
I am not interested in UWP.
Xamarin.Forms will support WPF in the future so you will be able to deploy an EXE file to those platforms. Read more about it here on the blog.
Also, you can always share the business logic, data and other layers with any other .NET application so having an Android app, Windows app and a core project that doesn't depend on Xamarin is perfectly fine.
You can already take a look at the WPF branch of the Xamarin.Forms project on GitHub.

XAML in Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android

I was giving an interview for a company and I was told by the architect that they are creating iOS apps from Xamarin.iOS ( NOT Xamarin Forms) with MvvmCross framework and they use storyboards for UI. But if the UI is very simple they use XAML to create them.
I never knew we can use XAML for Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Droid. We had a small discussion/argument if that's even possible. He said they were using it successfully.
My question, is it really possible to use XAML in Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Droid. Because, if we can do that, I feel no use of using Xamarin forms.
If yes, can anyone provide some kind of documentation?
Thank you.
There is no way to design UI in XAML using Xamarin.Android or Xamarin.iOS, but you can include Xamarin.Forms page in Xamarin.Android or Xamarin.iOS app. This way you can have native app with UI using storyboards, but with some Xamarin.Forms pages designed in XAML.
There is a sample how to do that in Xamarin Forms samples project on GitHub.
Only Xamarin Forms support sharing of UI via XAML.
UI for iOS has to be made using xib or storyboard.
For Android using AXML.
Windows Phone, UWP, WinPhone Silverlight, Windows can use XAML for UI.

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