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A mobile app using Xamarin

Today I started on a mobile app for my common-law wife. She is starting a workout program and I thought I could code up a simple Android app that she can use to keep track of the different exercises and the number of repetitions or duration to do them for.

As I have been working with C# for couple of years now and I feel comfortable with it I thought I would try using Xamarin. I discussed the functionality for the first version with my partner and sketched up a simple model of the entities. Then I figured it would be a good idea to try out a simple tutorial to get a feeling for it and ensure I have all the needed tools installed.

In the Visual Studio Installer there is a check box for mobile app development so I checked that and let everything install. Then in Visual Studio I created a new Android project, built it and pressed F5 to see what would happen.

No go! The Android emulator wants virtualization to be enabled in order to run in hardware accelerated mode. So I had to reboot the computer and turn on virtualization in the BIOS settings for my computer. Ok, attempt number 2.

Failure once again! This time the emulator refused to start complaining that it couldn't find proper x86 support. After fiddling around with it a bit I realized that it was possible to start the emulator from within powershell, using the exact same command line that Visual Studio attempted. And if I pressed F5 inside Visual Studio while I had the emulator already running Visual Studio nicely connected to it and loaded the app.

By now the time for one evening of coding had ran out. I did however post a bug report on Visual Studio explaining that I am unable to start a debug session towards the Android emulator from within Visual Studio without starting the emulator manually first.

Next time I hope to get some actual code written!

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