Hint: We highly recommend you setup and configure your system before attending the mobile workshop. Although we’ve allowed an hour in the morning to assist in troubleshooting configurations, we won’t have time to do a fresh installation.
Please bring your own Windows or Mac laptop. To participate in this workshop, some pre-work needs to be done. So please make sure you prepared your environment by setting up the following prerequisites:
- .NET Core 2.1 SDK (choose x64 Installer on Windows)
- Docker
- Azure CLI 2.0
- Terraform
You can completely follow the workshop without compiling the Mobile App on your own, as the full content is focused on architecting and creating Backends. However, if you already are a Xamarin Developer or always wanted to get started, install the Xamarin Tooling as well:
- Visual Studio for Windows or Mac (Community Version or higher)
- Xamarin Tooling
- Android SDK 8.1 Oreo (API Level 27)
- iOS SDK 11
You will need some of the contents of this workshop like the source code for the backend on your local machine. So it is a good idea to download the full repository as a ZIP file and extact it somewhere locally. You can easily do this by clicking the Clone or download button on the start page and select Download ZIP.
Creating a Microsoft Azure Account is easy! Just head over to the Microsoft Azure for Mobile Landingpage and create a free Account. If you already have a Microsoft, Outlook, Office 365 or Active Directory Account from you company, you can re-use it.
Although the free Account includes a bunch of services that you can use, in this workshop we will work with advanced resources, which we need an Azure Subscription for. An Azure Subscriptuon is basically the way to pay for charged services and can be backed by a Credit Card or a company agreement.
You can check the Subscriptions for you account when visiting the Azure Portal and selecting Subscriptions from the side menu.
If no Subscriptions appear, visit the Azure Subscription Portal to add one.
Most parts of this workshop are written in .NET Core 2.1 and we need to compile a few things from time to time. For this, we need to the .NET Core SDK installed. To check if the installation has been successful, open the Terminal or Command Prompt on your machine and type in
dotnet --infoIf the command line answers you similar like shown in the screenshot below, your machine can now run and compile .NET code.
Open Visual Studio Code and navigate to the Extensions tab on the left (or select View -> Extensions from the menu) and make sure that you installed the Azure App Service and Azure Functions extensions at least. If you don't have them installed, you can search for them in the Extensions tab.
Note, that you need to Reload Visual Studio Code after installing extensions!
Once the extensions has been installed successful and Visual Studio Code has been reloaded, you should see a new Azure tab on the side. Select it and make sure that you are logged in with you Azure account. Please verify, that you see at least one of your subscriptions here.
Now you are good to go! Open the recently downloaded and unzipped Workshop folder in Visual Studio Code by clicking File -> Open... in the menu and select the full folder. The result should look similar to this:
If you want to compile the Xamarin Application on you own, you will need to install the Xamarin tooling. You don't need to have this, to follow the workshop but if you already are a Xamarin Developer or always wanted to get started, give it a go! The setup of a Xamarin development environment can get a little bit tricky and time consuming as it has dependencies on many SDKs and technologies from different companies.
When working in Windows, Visual Studio will be the best IDE for you! You can check internally if you have a license for the paid versions or even go with the free Community Edition. Both will work for you.
Please follow this guide to install the Xamarin Tooling for Visual Studio on Windows and make sure, you have at least Android API Level 16 and an Android Emulator installed.
When working on Windows, you won't be able to build iOS solutions unless you connect your machine with a Mac in your network. To follow this workshop, an iOS configuration is not mandatory! Follow this guide if you want to connect to a Mac Build Host anyway.
When using a Mac, the best Xamarin Tooling provides Visual Studio for Mac. Xamarin should be installed during the installation of Visual Studio. Please follow this guide to make sure you don't miss anything.
If you want to build iOS solutions, make sure that XCode is also installed on the same device!
To make sure your environment works as expected and is able to compile and execute Xamarin apps, your can simply open the ContosoMaintenance.sln solution with Visual Studio and select the ContosoFieldService.iOS or ContosoFieldService.Droid project as your Startup project. If the application gets compiled and the app can be started, you are good to go.
