Xamarin Evolve 2013 – Day 2
Time flies. Day 2 of the Evolve conference has come to an end. Today was actually the second training day, and the conference itself has yet to start. Exciting!
The weather was nice again. Spent some time outside on the balcony, enjoying the sun and the warmth and a nice chat.
Today, the technical difficulties with the Wifi were gone so the training sessions went a bit smoother. Marcel and I actually started out in the Beginner’s track, that started with a session on navigation patterns. Some nice tips from Craig Dunn, who pointed us at the excellent Flyout Navigation and Sattellite Menu components, which provide new and modern navigation concepts for iOS apps.
After that, we jumped track back on the Advanced schedule for a module on Collection Views in iOS. The UICollectionView is a new UI paradigm in iOS, which drastically simplifies layouting collections of items in all sorts of forms. I recommend you take a look at this tutorial on the Xamarin docs site.
Speaking of docs, these last two days were a triumph for the Xamarin docs team. They wrote all the training material, which looks awesome and thorough. It is amazing how much great products and material is cranked out by Xamarin. The training material and the demo’s are exemplary of this.
The session I enjoyed the most was the one on Backgrounding, by Nina Vyedin. While she battled with the sound system that wouldn’t cooperate, she did a good job explaining the concepts around background tasks in both iOS and Android. Highlighting the similarities and differences, do’s and don’ts, before actually diving into code. All that with a couple of funny analogies to explain the concepts. Kudos.
Marcel and I had some work to do on our session, putting on the final touches, so we took some time in the afternoon to work on that. We did finish with the two modules on Code Sharing and Memory Management. Interesting talks. We’ll be speaking about our take on code sharing on Wednesday. The memory management module had some interesting tips on performance, something that’s very important in mobile apps. Mobile devices are not as powerful as laptop computers, so you have to be careful what you do with respect to memory usage and processor cycles.
The day ended with a fun and laid back welcome reception for the conference attendees. We had a couple of beers and some nice food and met some of the Xamarin folks. We decided to skip the GitHub Drinkup for tonight, but I hope everyone had fun there.
The reception featured a nice animation, projected on the big screen, that featured all nationalities present at Evolve. Very impressive. We learned that there are 11 Dutchies and I’m pretty sure that we’ve met them all 🙂
I haven’t gotten around to making more photo’s today, so these two will have to do. I did see another exciting bit of news fly by on Twitter today:
That’s awesome!
So tomorrow is going to be big! 200 additional attendees will arrive and join the 400 already here. The keynote by Nat and Miguel promises to be very exciting… Nat teased us in his welcome talk that there are going to be some very nice announcements. Can’t wait to find out!
I hope to see you guys in our session about Creating Unified Login for Apps. 2.30PM in the Gould Salon! Oh, and say hi to our colleague Henk, who’s manning the Info Support sponsor booth!
