Xamarin.Forms VS Xamarin.Essentials

EDIT2: Yeah, https://github.com/xamarin/Xamarin.Forms/issues/2751

Example issue: https://github.com/xamarin/Xamarin.Forms/issues/8640 Its an issue reported by David O, its a 3 year old issue, there is limited communication from Microsoft on the issue, no plans, there are a couple of community discovered workarounds that got broken in later versions of Xamarin.Forms. I feel like its fairly common to come across an issue like this that can be a showstopper for a task. Do you come up with a workaround, do you wait for an official fix, do you use a third-party NuGet to accomplish the task?

The deploying is also very buggy in my project, see this post: https://github.com/xamarin/Xamarin.Forms/issues/15253

Xamarin, it is "cross-platform" in the sense that it makes cross-platform applications, for Android and IOS and Windows. There are some implementations of Xamarin for other platforms like Linux (GTK#) or MacOs, but they're not really mature and stable yet. See https://github.com/xamarin/Xamarin.Forms/wiki/Platform-Support for more details.

It appears there is no view binding for this function... I've been googling around and saw this post https://github.com/xamarin/Xamarin.Forms/issues/10254 , but I can't implement it properly. It fails out with a dictionary exception.

You asked a bunch of questions there, I will try to answer them separately. 1) I am a XN expert and have a ton of experience in it, and from my research, it’s extremely difficult to get an experienced xamarin native developer. Xamarin Native is amazing experience to have, but There’s literally NO WAY left for someone to train themselves in xamarin native and I wrote about that here https://blog.devgenius.io/usingxamarinuniversitytolearnmobiledevelopment-808b6dec3e8b?sk=1c196f32400196f14dff7359f8ee51c0 So yes, I highly recommend running away from using xamarin native apps. Companies are having such a hard time finding experienced devs at regular rates. So anything is better really. 2) As to what language to select, Cross Platform >> Swift/Kotlin, these are also specialized skills that are just as rare to find both of in one senior skilled developer. Microsoft is actually putting in a lot of effort into building out the new Maui platform which is a piece of cake for xamarin forms developers to learn. There’s several migration tools already built as well, and the advantage of using Xamarin for you would be that you can keep your ViewModel layer exactly the same, you just have to build your view layer (also pretty easy to do with hot reload). Finally, it is important to note that more than 50% of ALL new mobile app development is moving towards React Native. The ability to use typescript (TS) instead of JavaScript removed the biggest negative against RN. Also keep in mind there’s no easy way of migrating from Xamarin Native to Xamarin forms except for starting a Xamarin forms app from scratch because of This issue https://github.com/xamarin/Xamarin.Forms/issues/8153

BTW this is the reported issue, please comment to push xamarin team look over it and maybe fix the bug

I'm worried that I'm experiencing this unresolved issue on GitHub.

If you're using shell on Android, this is a prevelant problem as your binding count grows. There has been a bug open on the Xamarin team for two years that keeps getting pushed in favor of MAUI work. https://github.com/xamarin/Xamarin.Forms/issues/7521

This one was one of the most annoying bugs in MAUI, and I solved it with this workaround taken from IeuanWalker on this thread.

This behavior is by design as it enables SSO with web identities but can be problematic in situations like this. Unfortunately, this kind of sign-out isn't a well-supported scenario, but you can read a good discussion on GitHub about it here: https://github.com/xamarin/Essentials/issues/1223.

I don't know where you're seeing "xamarin/Essentials", but that's a repo for code used in writing cross-platform mobile applications. That message refers to this issue: https://github.com/xamarin/Essentials/pull/1457. It's something that was fixed in the project 7 months ago.

First, add the Xamarin.Essentials NuGet Package to your projects. If you're using MVVM (Like we're doing in this example), you'll ideally want to install the Xamarin.Essentials.Interfaces NuGet Package

In the guide they have a link to a sample controller which does this, so I borrowed the code from it and ended up with this authentication controller method:

Xamarin.Essential >=1.5.3

Fortunately for us Xamarin developers, the Xamarin team and the community have created the Xamarin Essentials library and one of its utilities is the MediaPicker, which abstracts from you the logic for taking a picture with the camera or getting an image from the storage. You can read the documentation for the Media picker here.