Sign up to a free Xamarin HackDay in your local area

Last month, SSW held the first of many Xamarin HackDays. This one was at the Sydney office, and it was a great day. Xamarin is very important to all Microsoft developers as it allows us to write a C# app in Visual Studio and publish it to iOS, Android and Win phone8 in one fell swoop – woohoo!

The day started with three awesome presentations by local experts, Filip Ekberg, Rod Howarth, and Michael Ridland.

Figure: Filip Ekburg getting the crowd excited about Xamarin

After a nice steak lunch across the road at The Oaks Hotel, everyone piled back into the room for the hands-on afternoon session. The crowd formed into teams of 6 and they started hacking away.

I was impressed with how quickly the teams got stuck into their projects and battled to get native mobile applications up and running. Of course it helped that they were armed with the great knowledge learned that morning and that there were Xamarin experts lurking around the room, ready to remove any road blocks the teams encountered.

Figure: our HackDay attendees hard at work

The goal was that by the end of the afternoon each team would be ready to present to the room what they had achieved, but with minutes to go before the presentation, there were still many heads buried in laptops and screens being shared.

At 4pm each team used their 10 minutes to show hot tips that they had learned and what they had achieved. One of the most impressive projects presented was from self-diagnosed professional geek, Nick Hodge (Microsoft).

Using Xamarin Studio he created a new open source .NET library based on another open-source library from Microsoft, ported it to iOS, published to nuget (https://github.com/NickHodge/BoxKite.Twitter/), and then created a quick app to test.

After the show and tell, there were triumphant smiles as team members across the room admired their list boxes scrolling fluently – success!

What I am really proud of is that everyone who attended our day, even the beginners who knew nothing about Xamarin walked away with Xamarin installed on their laptop and had built their first mobile app.

Special thanks to Michael Ridland, David Burela and Ben Cull for making it an awesome day. Thanks also to Filip Ekberg and Rod Howarth for great talks. Thank you to Rebecca Liu for a beautiful website and to Raj Dhatt (SSW TV) for streaming the event live. Finally to Joanna Feely for helping in the background to make sure the event ran super smoothly.

After such a successful event, I’m happy to announce that Xamarin HackDays are now coming to Brisbane, Melbourne, and more. Be sure to sign up for the next Xamarin HackDay near you:

• Brisbane – 6th September
• Melbourne – 8th November
• Sydney – 6th December
• Beijing – August 30
• Redmond – September 27
• Slovenia – October 25

If you want to attend but don’t see an event in your area, sign up here to let us know.

I look forward to seeing you there. #XamarinHackDay