We are pleased to announce the general availability release of the Azure Storage client library for Xamarin. Xamarin is a leading mobile app development platform that allows developers to use a shared C# codebase to create iOS, Android, and Windows Store apps with native user interfaces. We believe the Azure Storage library for Xamarin will be instrumental in helping provide delightful developer experiences and enabling an end-to-end mobile-first, cloud-first experience. We would like to thank everyone who has leveraged previews of Azure Storage for Xamarin and provided valuable feedback.
The sources for the Xamarin release are the same as the Azure Storage .Net client library and can be found on Github. The installable package can be downloaded from nuget (version 7.2 and beyond) or from Azure SDK (version 2.9.5 and beyond) and installed via the Web Platform installer. This generally available release supports all features up to and included in the 2015-12-11 REST version.
Getting started is very easy. Simply follow the steps below:
- Install Xamarin SDK and tools and any language specific emulators as necessary: For instance, you can install the Android KitKat emulator.
- Create a new Xamarin project and install the Azure Storage nuget package version 7.2 or higher in your project and add Storage specific code.
- Compile, build and run the solution. You can run against a phone emulator or an actual device. Likewise you can connect to the Azure Storage service or the Azure Storage emulator.
Please see our Getting Started Docs and the reference documentation to learn how you can get started with the Xamarin client library and build applications that leverage Azure Storage features.
We currently support shared asset projects (e.g., Native Shared, Xamarin.Forms Shared), Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android projects. This Storage library leverages the .Net Standard runtime library that can be run on Windows, Linux and MacOS. Learn about .Net Standard library and .Net Core. Learn about Xamarin support for .Net Standard.
As always, we continue to do our work in the public GitHub development branch for visibility and transparency. We are working on building code samples in our Azure Storage samples repository to help you better leverage the Azure Storage service and the Xamarin library capabilities. A Xamarin image uploader sample is already available for you to review/ download. If you have any requests on specific scenarios you'd like to see as samples, please let us know or feel free to contribute as a valued member of the developer community. Community feedback is very important to us.
Enjoy the Xamarin Azure Storage experience!
Thank you
Dinesh Murthy, Michael Roberson, Michael Curd, Elham Rezvani, Peter Marino and the Azure Storage Team.