What's New in Xamarin.Forms & Native Mobile for 15.1

Jason Beres [Infragistics] / Tuesday, April 14, 2015

With our goals to deliver the most comprehensive set of UI controls for native mobile development, we are releasing our second official release of our Xamarin.Forms toolset. As I talked about last year, we have invested heavily in the native UI controls - we have an iOS control set, Android control set and Windows Phone control set. Up until now, the target developer for these control sets were your objective-C, Java or Windows Developer. With Infragistics Xamarin.Forms, the market is super-expanded - any Visual Studio, C#, XAML Developer can now write once, a single codebase, and then take our new Xamarin.Forms product with Xamarin’s product and ship native apps that target each major platform in no time.  That's right - use your existing Visual Studio, XAML & C# skills that you've honed over the years to deliver to-the-metal native experiences on every relevant mobile platform today.

<p > If you look at our WPF product, or NucliOS, our native iOS product, and examine the data visualization stack, we are working towards a baseline of those controls for Xamarin.Forms. With this release, we are moving closer to that goal. We are also continuing to invest of the cross-platform data grid control that we shipped last year, we’ve made some improvements there and will continue to push forward with the first, true cross-platform line-of-business / modern mobile data grid on the market.<h1 > 15.1 Features

Updated Platform Support

  • Support for Unified API 
  • Support for Xamarin 1.3 

 

Data Chart Features


In the first version on the data chart for Xamarin.Forms some features will be RTM while others will be CTP. The chart control provides modular design of legend, axis, markers, series, and layers. This chart feature allows multiple instances of these visual elements in the same chart plot area in order to create composite chart views.

 

 Shipping with 15.1:

  • Category Series
    • Area / Step Area
    • Bar / Bar Side by Side
    • Column / Column Side by Side
    • Spline / Spline Area
    • Point
    • Line
    • Step Line
    • Waterfall
    • Range Category Series
    • Range Area
    • Range Bar
    • Range Column
    • Scatter Series
    • Scatter Points
    • Scatter Lines
    • Scatter Splines
  • BulletGraph
  • Financial Indicators
    • Bollinger Band
    • Typical Price
    • Median Price
    • Moving Average Convergence Divergence
    • Percentage Price Oscillator
    • Percentage Volume Oscillator
    • Absolute Volume Oscillator
    • Relative Strength Index
    • Accumulation Distribution
    • Average True Range
    • Commodity Channel Index
    • Fast Stochastic Indicator
    • Full Stochastic Indicator
    • Rate of Change
    • TRIX
    • Williams %R Indicator
    • Ease of Movement   
    • Detrended Price Oscillator
    • Force Index
    • StochRSI Indicator
    • Standard Deviation
    • On Balance Volume
    • Price Volume Trend
    • Price Channel Overlay
    • Positive Volume Index
    • Money Flow Index
    • Ultimate Oscillator
    • Market Facilitation Index
    • Chaikin Oscillator
  • Trendlines
    • Simple Moving Average
    • Exponential Moving Average
    • Modified Exponential Moving Average
    • Weighted Moving Average
  • Financial Series
    • Candlestick
    • OHLC
  • Crosshair
  • Legend
  • Markers
  • Axis
    • Numeric ( Linear / Logarithmic)
    • Category
  • Panning
  • Zooming

Still in Preview, but stable.  Docs are holding us back from our official RTM:

  • Radial Series
  • Polar Series
  • DateTime Axis
  • Annotation Layers
  • Transition in Animations

 

 

Data Grid

     
The Data Grid is still in Preview release, we are still working on the API and expect to improve the scenarios that you would expect in a modern, mobile Data Grid.  Current features will include:

  • Auto Generating Columns
  • Auto and Fixed Sized Columns
  • Templated Columns
  • Grouping
  • Data Adaptors
  • Text Columns
  • Images Columns

 

 

Gauges

     
We are shipping:

  • Radial gauge
  • Linear gauge

 

Each gauge will have:

  • Needles
  • Ranges
  • Scale
  • Animated Transitions
  • Background support

 

Bullet Graph

Bullet Graph is shipping with the following features:

  • Orientation and Direction
  • Scale
  • Performance Bar
  • Comparative Ranges
  • Background
  • Tooltips
  • Title and Subtitle

    

Barcode


We are shipping Barcode 128.


 

Pie Chart

Included in the release as RTM will contain:

  • Others Category
  • Selection
  • Explosion


 

Customer Support

  • Improve Samples Browser
    • Numerous bug fixes to the samples browser have been completed
    • Also be updating images as per Visual Design team and also significantly improved the performance of the samples browser on all platforms.
  • Create Documentation
    • Released will be a complete set of documentation

 

That's it for Xamarin.Forms 15.1.  We are excited to get these enhamncements and improvements in your hands, and look forward to a strong 15.2 release later this year with more features and functionality to help you build the absolute best modern, native mobile apps.  If you have any questions, shoot me an email at jasonb@infragistics.com, and if you'd like to see features that we don't have yet, please post to User Voice and let us know!