TechEd Australia 2014: Sydney

It was great fun speaking on Xamarin at TechEd last week. Thanks to all who were able to attend, and extra thanks to those who completed the evaluation and left some feedback. Special thanks also to the staff at White Clarke and the regulars at #SydMobNet who sat through my practice runs and gave some valuable input and pointers.

There were questions about the setup of the development environment I was using. Andrew Coates (@coatsy) from Microsoft has written an excellent step by step guide here: https://github.com/MvvmCross/MvvmCross/wiki/Setting-up-a-Cross-Platform-Build-Environment

Most of the sessions are available now on http://channel9.msdn.com (search for TechEd Australia 2014). Many of the recordings available were of the sessions presented in Melbourne. Mine's not listed yet because I was only able to present in Sydney (due to the clash with the Xamarin Evolve conference), but it should be there soon. I'll post a link once it's available.

EDIT: ...and here's the link: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/Australia/2014/WPD313

In the meantime, all the code used in the demos is available here: https://github.com/AlecDTucker

I ran up all the Android demos using the new Xamarin Android Player, which worked very nicely. I set it up to run on my Mac, deploying and debugging directly from Visual Studio running in a VM. To do this just follow the instructions in James Montemagno's blog post here: http://motzcod.es/post/100735916227/debug-with-the-xamarin-android-player-from-visual. It's pretty straightforward and mostly problem free. I occasionally have to restart Visual Studio after running the adb connect statement, but more often than not it picks up the emulator quickly.

If you have any comments on or questions about the session then please feel free to post them here. If you want to find out more then come along to the next Sydney Mobile .Net Developers meetup. You can join here: http://meetup.com/SydneyMobileDotNetDevelopers

There's also a hack day coming up in December, where I'll be presenting again. Details on that can be found here: http://www.xamarinhackday.com. There's also one scheduled in Melbourne at the end of this month. Michael Ridland, who created the event, is a regular at the above meetup so you can ask him all about it there if you have any questions.