Xamarin is a popular cross-platform mobile development tool for creating an application for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. Typically, in order to create an iOS application, you will be using Objective-C in Xcode; to create an Android application, you will need to use Java in Eclipse or Android Studio; and to create a Windows Phone application, you will need to use C# in Visual Studio. As you can imagine, creating an application for all three major mobile platforms requires three different programming languages and their integrated development environments. With Xamarin, you only need to know C# and Visual Studio. Here are the advantages of utilizing Xamarin:
- Use only C# and Visual Studio to write an application for all platforms (iOS, Android, and Windows Phone).
- The code can be shared across all platforms.
- The user interface can be developed once and can be used on all platforms.
- C# is a very powerful object-oriented language with many advanced capabilities, allowing users to quickly create an application.
- There are large numbers of C# developers available, due to the popularity of Microsoft technology.
- The application performs at the native level because compiled code converts to native byte code.
- Xamarin does not hide platform APIs, but rather fully exposes all native platform APIs as is (iOS, Android, and Windows Phone). In fact, the method names and the programming namespaces exactly match those of native platforms.
- There are many available third-party UI components and libraries to help in development.
- It is free.