Xamarin Evolve 2016

• May 10th, 2016
• Michael Williams
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It took 21 hours of flying to make it to Orlando for the Xamarin Evolve conference. Was worth it? Definitely.

After battling through the jet lag for the past week I have spent many hours attending training and listening from the experts behind cross-platform development.

With the recent acquisition, the atmosphere was nothing more than one of big celebration. Now having the power of Microsoft behind the company, the amount of developers using their platform has grown 3 times in size. Xamarin has also released a heap of new tools and goodies to allow for their new mobile-optimised development life-cycle.

New updates were announced for Xamarin Test Cloud, including the ability to remotely access a specific device to test and debug an application in real-time. The Xamarin IDE (for Mac) will remain closed-source for now, with the company to focus its open-source efforts on the “runtime side of things”. Xamarin is however open-sourcing its SDKs for Android, iOS and Mac.

Aside from all the new updates, there was a great range of speakers presenting wise words around the complexity of today’s technology.

Mythbusters engineer Grant Masura speaks about his time on the show, his engineering behind experiments, and how we all must accept failure, put aside our egos and listen to the members in your team.

The co-founder of Apple, Steve Wozniak, speaks his mind on self-driving vehicles and voice recognition applications, even how he convinced his wife to buy a Tesla.

As well as a full conference schedule, attendees had the opportunity to test out their skills completing hack exercises, play around with some remote controlled devices, and speak to a bunch companies showing off new sdks, frameworks and devices.

With such a broad range of developers, business owners and tech savy people, coming from so many different backgrounds, it seems Microsoft’s acquisition of Xamarin hasn’t slowed down the momentum at all, in fact it may have even increased it.