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Showing posts from March, 2016

Compared: Xamarin vs Xcode - iOS App Size and Startup Speed

In  Xamarin  I created a  Single View App  targeted for iOS and Android with a Shared Library. I changed the scheme to Release and removed the button click logic from ViewController.cs since Xcode's doesn't start with any button click logic. I confirmed that debugging was not enabled by putting a breakpoint in the ViewDidLoad() event, and it never hit that breakpoint. The deployment target was set to iOS 9.2. In  Xamarin  I created a  Xamarin.Forms App  targeted for iOS and Android with a Shared Library. I changed the scheme to Release. I confirmed that debugging was not enabled by putting a breakpoint in the App() method, and it never hit that breakpoint. The deployment target was set to iOS 9.2. In Xcode I created a Single View App using Swift targeting Universal devices. I opened the Run scheme, changed it to use the Build Configuration of Release and unchecked Debug Executable. Under Options I unchecked Core Location, XPC Services, View Debugging, and Queue Debugging.

Solved: Splash Screen for Xamarin.Forms Android Project

When launching a Xamarin.Forms apps for Android it starts out on a regular Activity while it prepares and launches the Forms activity. This delay is not very pretty and displays a regular android activity for maybe 2 seconds (on my Galaxy S6) before launching the intended Xamarin.Forms screen. While it is probably not possible to speed up the load, there is something you can do about the look of the app while the Forms activity is loading: and that is to display a splash screen. First I thought I could just add my own class, call SetContentLayout and be on my way, but even the process of loading a layout has a delay. It isn't two seconds like when loading a Xamarin Forms activity, but there is still a noticeable delay. What you really need, as Thomas Burkhart  and Chris Stewart recommend is a splash screen. Xamarin has sample code for implementing a splash screen in a Xamarin.Android project. This example code takes a graphic and stretches it across the whole splash screen.