CODEWITHSUNDEEP
xamarin
Sirus
Sirus

Reputation: 502

Xamarin Cross Platform Development .net

We are developing a cross platform mobile application using Xamarin. I have noticed there are different ways of structuring your code using Shared code or PCL/.net standard. I attempted to use .net standard and what i have found is that it doesn't include all the libraries such as using ado stuff , datatable/datasets using system.data. Or using system.net for example. Other functions have less overloads and seems that its a stripped version of .net to work across platforms. Is there any way to add this functionality or use a broader range of .net?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 65

Answers (1)

Dave Smash
Dave Smash

Reputation: 3001

You are correct - .Net Standard and .Net Core are stripped down versions of the full .Net framework. They contain only features that can be used on all platforms (Mac, Android, iOS, Linux, Windows, etc.)

The full .Net framework only needs to work on Windows, so there are additional things that you can do based on the fact that there is less complexity in implementing and that the code base is more mature (cross platform is still pretty new by C# standards). To the best of my memory, System.Net should work if you have your references correct, but System.Data will not (or at least direct database access is not possible)

You can regain some functionality through NuGet packages, but it won't be the same as using WinForms or something like that...

My best advice would be to program against an API. You can use a web server that runs on the normal (full) .Net framework, and does all the heavy lifting using all the .Net features that you are accustomed to. Your Xamarin app would send and receive data from the API and basically provide a mobile front end for whatever you are doing. This approach makes sense for most apps anyway, and is generally what you would be doing anyway if you used Swift and Java to create separate iOS and Android apps.

Upvotes: 2

Related Questions