Free Xamarin University Resources
Xamarin University offers a wealth of training materials across a broad range of subjects with live instructor led courses, self guided training, guest lectures, and more.
Many of the introductory materials are available for free or included with other programs and I wanted to capture links to them here so people can get started even if they're not yet ready to pull the trigger on a full Xamarin University subscription.
Self-Guided Lessons & Free Trial
You can access many self-guided lessons from Xamarin University for free by visiting https://university.xamarin.com/self-guided and creating a Xamarin account (or signing in with an existing one).
These self-guided lessons include videos, exercises, quizzes, and earn you credit towards becoming a Xamarin Certified mobile developer.
If this is your first time signing in to Xamarin University, this will also start a free trial that includes 30 days of access to Xamarin University's Guest Lectures and two live instructor led courses in addition to the self-guided lessons.
Dev Essentials & Visual Studio Subscribers
If you are a Visual Studio Dev Essentials program member or Visual Studio subscriber (formerly MSDN), you have access to additional course content in Xamarin University above and beyond the self guided lessons.
Visit the My Visual Studio portal and log in to activate your Xamarin University benefits.
On-Demand Videos
Lightning Lectures
Xamarin University's Lightning Lectures are available for anyone to watch without a Xamarin account and are short, focused sessions that cover a variety of common challenges, tools, and topics around mobile development.
Connect(); // 2016
As part of the Connect(); //2016 event, six on demand videos were published by Xamarin University. These videos are available on Xamarin University, Channel 9, and YouTube.
The training materials for these sessions can be found on GitHub.
Module #1 - Introduction to Xamarin Platform (Rob Gibbens)
This session provides a quick introduction to the Xamarin tools for Visual Studio. It will show you what you need to develop, debug, deploy and publish applications for iOS and Android using Visual Studio 2015 or Visual Studio 2017 RC with the Xamarin tools installed.
Watch on Channel 9 | Watch on YouTube
Module #2 - Introduction to Xamarin.Forms (Renè Ruppert)
In this session, we will dive into Xamarin.Forms, a cross-platform UI framework that allows you to create native UIs for iOS, Android and Windows with shared code. By the end of this session, you will have a good understanding of how Xamarin.Forms works, how to design basic pages, and how to share code with Portal Class Libraries or Shared Projects. Finally, we will begin a new project – a Trivia app, which will be completed throughout the remainder of the sessions.
Watch on Channel 9 | Watch on YouTube
Module #3 - XAML Fundamentals (Jesse Dietrichson)
Xamarin.Forms supports the use of the XAML markup language to design your UI. In this session, we will cover the basics of the XAML language, design a few more screens for our trivia application, and explore some best practices when using XAML with your mobile applications and Xamarin.Forms.
Watch on Channel 9 | Watch on YouTube
Module #4 - Adding Azure Web Services (Jason DeBoever)
Now that the main pieces of the trivia application are in place, we will explore adding a server backend to our mobile application using Azure App services. This session will show you how quick and easy it is to add a cloud-based database which is synchronized to your application, allowing you to change the data that drives your application without publishing a new version of the application each time.
Watch on Channel 9 | Watch on YouTube
Module #5 - UITesting (Glenn Stephens)
We all know that we need to test our applications thoroughly to ensure quality – and this is particularly important in the mobile world where a few bad reviews can kill your sales on the various app stores! In this session, we will test our trivia application using Xamarin.UITest and Xamarin TestCloud. These tools allow you to define the behavior of your application and then automate the application on simulators and physical devices to validate the expected behavior. To ensure we try our app on every possible variation, we will push our tests up to the cloud where we can run it across hundreds of real devices and get back a comprehensive report of any failures.
Watch on Channel 9 | Watch on YouTube
Module #6 - Distributing your application and collecting information (Kym Phillpotts)
In this final session, we will get ready to distribute our trivia application to the world – starting with some beta testers. We will look at two different systems – first, HockeyApp which allows us to monitor and collect runtime analytics from our application as it runs on all our beta testers devices. Then, we will take a quick look at Visual Studio Mobile Center, announced at Connect(); which brings a lot of the mobile platform systems we looked at over the course of the day together.
Watch on Channel 9 | Watch on YouTube
Full Subscriptions
Once you're ready, you can purchase a full subscription to Xamarin University that includes unlimited live online instructor led training, 1-on-1 office hours with instructors, unlimited access to recorded class videos, self-guided lessons, class labs and training materials, and the Xamarin certification exam.
The complete course catalog contains over 70 classes across 8 different tracks ranging from beginner level C# to advanced enterprise security in mobile applications.
Visit https://www.xamarin.com/university for more information on purchasing.