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Being an Expert at Xam(arin) Expert Day

by | 18/11/2019 | Conferences

Cologne, German Beers, German Fairgrounds and loads of fun! 25th October I had a talk at Expert Day for Xamarin. I flew in from an evening flight on the 24th straight after Microsoft TechDays in Sweden. I missed the speaker’s dinner but when I arrived at the Microsoft offices on the 25th I knew I was with my Xamarin Family

James’ Keynote

Me and James Montemagno
Me and James Montemagno

No one less than the one and only James Montemagno was invited to speak at this conference! James was James as he always is, awesome! James showed Hot Reload, and I remember a very good demo and explanation of the Android AOT (Ahead of Time) compiler.

DevOps: Continuous delivery for Xamarin applications, Azure DevOps and App Center

Picture of Stefanija who's presenting a great talk!
Stefanija is presenting a great talk!

In this talk Stefanija Popovska answered a question I had for a long time: “When do I use Azure DevOps or when do I use App Center?”.  I am a developer who’s longer on the Azure DevOps stack (from a long way ago since it was called VSTS Visual Studio Team Services. And if you are used to this tool stack and you are also developing other applications like web and desktop applications, then you can stay with Azure DevOps. If you are new the DevOps world and want to have a quick setup, you can use the fast and fluid set up of App Center.

If your choice is Azure DevOps, you can flavor your application with some special App Center features like Push Notifications and testing on real devices.

Really good talk!

UI Testing with Xamarin.Forms

If we go further on DevOps, I think about Testing Codrina showed us how you can make UI Tests with Xamarin.Forms. Codrina used a really good way of explaining the UI Testing methodology and concepts. A talk with the important basics to get started!

And of course, my talk: Improve people with disabilities life with Xamarin.Essentials

There was a lot of interest in my talk. I loved the huge amount of people showed up. I like to see that more and more people take time to learn about accessible software development. In this talk I spoke about Text To Speech who is a very accessibility specific function. I also talked about classes like Device Info and App Info that are very useful if you develop apps for people with disabilities’ but the caregiver, coach or parent isn’t the best IT’er and don’t know advanced device functions, like the current version of your device’s OS or the version of your app.

And we were in Germany!

And that means fairgrounds, beer gardens and a nice German culture. Honestly, I love Germany! I love the culture. For this reason, I stay a day longer and took a free day in Cologne! I went to a big fairground and made walk at the side of the Köln Messe a very important congress building!