Xamarin University Thoughts

[Neil Whitlow]

I thoroughly enjoyed Xam U, even though it wore me out, and my work is not done yet.  I have until April 10 to take the cert exam.

Some warts since I was in the first set of classes ever. The first week or so, the third party scheduling website they were using was horrible.  Xamarin had their own website stood pretty quickly and switched us to that, and it works just great.  They recorded most classes, and put the best ones up on the site so you could watch them as a refresher.

When our "semester" ended, it was probably 2 weeks before I got the e-mail with instructions for the certification test. We only had access to the training site for 1 week after the semester ended though, so I can't go back and watch videos now.

As I had never used a modern Mac before, or even touched any kind of IOS device, I have a lot of reinforcement to do between now and the test.  The good thing is that you do have a generous 4 weeks from the time they invite you to take the cert.  So I will be pouring though all the IOS code again (and light refreshers on Android) in the next couple of weeks and hitting the cert exam around the first of April.

Class Times

Since I'm not in a position to do mobile coding during the day job, I was constrained to nights and weekends.  Most of my classes were from 8-11 Nashville time.   I was able to take a few on the Jan and Feb Monday holidays during the day.  I also did a couple of caffeine-required crack of dawn Saturday classes.  For those of you who can take some classes during business hours, you should have a much easier time of scheduling. 

Class Tracks and Prerequisites

They have the required classes for the certifications laid out pretty clearly so you know what you need to be eligible to take the cert exams.  

Xamarin Certified iOS Developer

Optional Intro to Mobile/Kickstart

Optional Either Intro to iOS with Xamarin Studio, or Intro to iOS with Visual Studio

Required Tables and Collection Views in iOS

Required Data in Mobile

Required Backgrounding

Required Mobile Navigation Patterns

Required Publishing an App

Xamarin Certified Android Developer

Optional Intro to Mobile/Kickstart

Optional Either Intro to Android with Xamarin Studio, or Intro to Android with Visual Studio

Required Listviews and Adapters in Android

Required Data in Mobile

Required Backgrounding

Required Mobile Navigation Patterns

Required Publishing an App

Xamarin Certified Mobile Developer 

The Mobile Developer Certification requires all Classes specified above in the iOS and Android Certifications as well as the following classes:

Required Introduction to Cross-platform Development

Required Advanced Cross-platform Development

Required Memory Management and Best Practices

I'm sure because it was the inaugural session, there were some issues in the first couple of weeks with having enough class slots for me to take prerequisites that I would need for classes the next week.  I wasn't the only one, because they added many new times and dates for classes as the days went by.  They also actually extended the "semester" from 4 weeks to 5 to allow for how the scarcity of classes that first week impacted the tracks.

I came into this never having used the trials for Visual Studio so I actually took all the optional Intro classes.  I only own the Android Windows Indie version, so had not used XS on the Mac at all.  So three of those Intro classes were quite valuable to me.

Xam U finally pushed me over the hump to grab my first Mac ever, as I bought a Mac Mini and then stuffed it with RAM.  Prep for the first week of classes was especially time consuming for me, as I was using an alien operating system, and going through the initial setup of things like the Apple developer tools, making sure Xamarin hello world solutions in Visual Studio could find and use the Mac build agent over on the mini, etc.  

Class Format and Instructors

GotoTraining was the tool used, and it worked just fine.  The interactive format was awesome.  I found myself asking questions mostly via chat rather than voice while the class was going on. I think they tried to keep classes to 15 or so students, but can't remember exact numbers.

Most of the classes had zip files to download that contained a primed version of the projects, as well as a completed version.  Nearly all classes had us start with those primed versions..explained a lot about what was already in them, and then the instructors led us through putting the meaty code in.  A couple of classes were mostly lecture because of the topic, and on those we all just looked at code and walked through it with the instructor.

I enjoyed some instructors more than others because of their style, speed, or way of presenting.  My particular favorite was Glenn Stephens.  However, even those instructors that I did not care for as they walked us through the class itself absolutely rocked on Q and A like all the others.

A few classes went the distance of the full time allotted.  Most of the  8-11 classes were finished by 10 or so. Then the instructors hung around, most of us unmuted and questions by voice and discussions ensued.  I found that the Q&A at the end of each class was my favorite.  As I said above, every instructor I had was awesome at the post-class Q&A.  This was where I was able to ask practical questions about frameworks, patterns, etc that these guys had been using in anger for real world deployed apps.   

Final Thoughts

Before Xam U, even though I was only a night and weekender, I had gone pretty deep into several as-yet unfinished hobby apps..continually getting sidetracked by going deeply into certain topics on things I wanted to really gold-plate and learn well. Consequently, I was already familiar with a lot of what they presented to us on that platform.

Since I was a complete noob with IOS, however, I was able to discover that they do indeed have a good curriculum for beginners.  Going blindly into that, I could see that the classes moved at a good pace, and built on concepts well.

[Andres Pineda]

Neil:

Thanks for sharing this. I have been using Xamarin for almost a year now basically with IOS development. I want to grab more Android experience though. My question is: is it worthy?

I mean is not that cheap I one might expect.

Regards,

Andres