Xamarin templates from Microsoft

I’ve arranged all the available repositories in a single Airtable gallery so you don’t have to: https://airtable.com/shrqVDEpqrMon45YQ

One of the toughest aspects of determining whether a tutorial or set of templates is going to be worthwhile, is not being able to immediately visualise what it builds. The Learn platform offers step-by-step workshops introducing some of the key Xamarin development processes, but how do you choose between workshops? They each take at least an hour, so it’s a valid question. And yet of the 19 available, only one has a repository providing screenshots as a preview to what you’ll have created by the end.

This leads to the tangible temptation to skip through the pages of the workshop, speeding on to the final page in the hope of finding some showcase of the final product in all its functioning glory. And that’s never a great idea, especially in the case of these Xamarin tutorials where:

• there is now showcase, so you’re left disappointed.
• the subsections are checked green as you complete them, removing a small but crucial element of the gamified experience of checking them off as you genuinely step through, genuinely picking up new skills as you read.

Thus the Airtable I’ve built accomplishes the simple bolstering task of a simple preview. If you’re looking for databasing capabilities, hit the “sqlite” or “xaml” one; for navigation try the “dual screen” or “viewmodel” or “navigation” tutes.

Final note: at time of writing there is no Authentication tutorial, so the best I can recommend (for Xamarin) is the devblog by Jon Dick. This is fairly text-heavy so you may find it more inspiring to watch the handson style of Wael Yasmina albeit he’s covering a different product (Firebase) in a different language (JS). The YouTube links at top & tail of his post, take you over to YouTube for walkthrough & explanation of auth in principle & practice.