Week Three: A Microsoft Developer’s Introduction to Xamarin and Cross-Platform Development

So, from the task list I put together in  Week Two: A Microsoft Developer’s Introduction to Xamarin and Cross-Platform Development, I was able to accomplish the Push Notifications and Unit/UI Testing tasks. I was also able to get Xamarin Insights working with the bootstrapping aspect of the application. It works slightly differently on iOS than Android so I wanted to get initialization complete on each platform rather than in a common solution.

Getting this working lead me to think that building your own Insights-like functionality really wouldn’t be that hard as long as you knew where to go to collect the kinds of information that you were interested in. I went on a short detour into investigating the ACR.DeviceInfo package. It really does help get nearly as much information about the device being used as the Xamarin Insights application does. You’d really only need to build your own API to collect the data et voilà, you have your own, custom, Insights-like application sans the IDE integration. I left off with this on Friday and didn’t have time to quite implement it the way I had wanted. I hope to have something up and working here early this week.