I spent a few days this week at Xamarin EVOLVE, hanging out with the Xamarin folks, the mobile cross-platform dev community, talking to attendees at our booth and speaking about mobile geospatial development. It was definitely a great event and Xamarin deserves major kudos, both for the event itself, but also for their products and impressive keynote announcements. Xamarin is a partner of Infragistics and it’s certainly an exciting time to be a mobile developer.

As promised during my talk, I’m posting all my session material here, including the slides, demos, and reference links. I had a great time at EVOLVE and I hope to speak there again if/when Xamarin holds another show.

Building Mobile Cross-Platform Geospatial Apps

This session will not reveal why we are on Earth, but it will teach you how to find out where we all are on it. Looking for the user? Just find the phone. Thanks to standard built-in Location Services and hybrid positioning hardware, every modern smartphone knows where it is. In this session, ActiveNick shows you how to build a truly “smart” cross-platform phone application by adding Geospatial Services to it. Using C# and MonoTouch for iOS, the Windows Phone SDK, and Mono for Android, you will learn how to locate the device using the phone GPS and other Location Services, display spatial data on maps, manipulate them with touch gestures, geocode addresses into lat/long pairs, and more. We’ll discuss the various mapping technologies, SDKs and APIs across various mobile platforms, how to tap into geospatial features programmatically with Xamarin tools, and explore how geospatial systems can benefit from mobile services and apps. Location Intelligence is a natural extension of mobility. Come learn how all mobile developers should also be geospatial developers.

Download the session slides here

Download the iOS & Windows Phone demo here

Download the Android demo here. It’s a modified version of the Google Maps Android API v2 demo found on Github here. Make sure to read both readme files in the Zip since you’ll need dependencies from the Github project to make the demo work.

Noteworthy Links

• Generate JSON Parsing Classes in C#: http://json2csharp.com
• Google Maps
• Google Maps Developer Resources: developers.google.com/maps
• Google API Console: code.google.com/apis/console
• Google Maps SDK for iOS: developers.google.com/maps/documentation/ios
• Google Maps Android API v2: developers.google.com/maps/documentation/android
• Geocoding API: developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding
• OpenStreetMap (OSM)
• OpenStreetMap Wiki: wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Main_Page
• Nominatim Geocoding Service: wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim
• Bing Maps
• Bing Maps Platform Page: www.microsoft.com/maps
• Bing Maps Developer Resources: www.microsoft.com/maps/developer-resources.aspx
• Bing Maps Management Portal: www.bingmapsportal.com
• Esri ArcGIS
• Esri ArcGIS Developer Center: developers.arcgis.com
• Free Data: www.esri.com/data/free-data

Building iOS Apps with Xamarin and NucliOS

We (Infragistics) launched release 13.1 of all our developer controls yesterday. This includes NucliOS 13.1, our stellar native controls for iOS developers. With NucliOS you get a powerful data & layout grid control, a versatile chart control supporting more than 40 chart types – including the new Pie Chart control – as well radial gauges and rich-text labels.

The good news for C# developers is that NucliOS also ships with full bindings for Xamarin.iOS. With a single package, NucliOS offers the best native iOS controls for developers, whether they build their apps in Objective C with Xcode, or in C# with Visual Studio or Xamarin Studio.

If you’ve never built any apps for iOS or even learned iOS development, this is your chance to get started. Download the free starter edition of Xamarin.iOS here, then download the trial for NucliOS and start building gorgeous iOS apps for iPhone and iPad today.

Here are some links to get you started.

Download a trial version of NucliOS 13.1 here

NucliOS Product Page at Infragistics.com

What’s New in NucliOS 13.1 for iOS Developers

Visit the NucliOS 13.1 page in the Xamarin Component Store here

Creating iOS Apps with Xamarin.iOS and NucliOS – Webinar by Brent Schooley

Download the NucliOS 13.1 Samples Browser for free on your iPhone or iPad from the iTunes App Store here

Until Next Time…

I will be doing a very similar session to my mobile cross-platform geospatial apps talk at Code PaLOUsa, April 25-27 (next week!), in Louisville, KY. Make sure to attend if you’re in the area.

You can also catch me and attend more of my talks at the following events over the next few months:

• Prairie DevCon, May 6-7, in Winnipeg, MB
• Visual Studio Live!, May 13-16, in Chicago, IL
• Philly Code Camp, May 11, in Abington, PA
• DevTeach, May 27-31, in Toronto / Mississauga, ON
• TechEd North America, June 3-6, in New Orleans, LA – Look for me at the Infragistics booth!
• Visual Studio Live!, August 19-23, in Redmond, WA

If you have any questions about the topics discussed in these sessions, you can post them in the comments below or contact me on Twitter at @ActiveNick.