News

Syncfusion Enhances Cross-Platform Xamarin Functionality

• By David Ramel
• July 20, 2016

Enhanced cross-platform development functionality with Xamarin and JavaScript highlights today's release of Syncfusion's updated enterprise development suite.

Xamarin is the new star of Microsoft's cross-platform mobile dev tooling since being acquired by the Redmond software giant early this year. Xamarin tooling allows cross-platform development for iOS and Android devices with a single C# codebase. Syncfusion said bolstering the cross-platform capabilities of its Xamarin and JavaScript suites was a primary focus of the new Essential Studio Enterprise Edition 2016 Volume 2 release, along with Universal Windows Platform (UWP) enhancements.

Syncfusion specializes in providing prebuilt controls, components and frameworks for developers using the Microsoft .NET Framework and JavaScript. In addition to targeting the aforementioned supported technologies, the Essential Studio Enterprise Edition includes more than 650 components for Windows Forms, WPF, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Web Forms, WinRT, Windows Phone, LightSwitch and Silverlight.

In the Xamarin suite, Xamarin.Forms received new controls, and both iOS and Android controls were updated, with a nod to Agile development. "Essential Studio for Xamarin now has a kanban control for Xamarin.Android and Xamarin.iOS, which can be used to visualize a project's progression through different stages of a workflow, and all three Xamarin offerings, including Xamarin.Forms, add a data-source control, which allows raw data to be consumed and manipulated via sorting, filtering, and grouping," Syncfusion said in a statement today.

Other improvements to the Xamarin suite listed by Syncfusion include:

• Step area series support for charts.
• Ten new technical indicators for charts, such as MACD and Bollinger band.
• The capability to interactively expand and collapse groups in the data grid control at run time.
• Support for unbound columns in the data grid control.

Additionally, the JavaScript suite, also used for cross-platform development, was improved in several areas.

"Essential Studio for JavaScript simplifies cross-platform development by adding support for Angular 2 and Aurelia, and ensuring that all JavaScript controls render responsively on phones, tablets and desktops," the company said. "This release also adds new sparkline, heat map, and pivot tree map controls to the JavaScript collection."

The third suite receiving special attention in the new release, UWP, sees three new controls added and enhancements to existing controls.

Other listed highlights of the new release include:

• New heat map and kanban controls for ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC.
• A spell checker control for the Windows Forms suite.
• A number of customer-requested features and performance improvements.

"Each release we strive to enhance all suites, across all platforms," said Syncfusion exec Daniel Jebaraj. "We did that in Volume 2 with special emphasis on our offerings for Xamarin, UWP and JavaScript. For two suites -- Xamarin and UWP -- we already had the largest collection of components available, yet we continued to aggressively expand in those areas."

Essential Studio 2016 Volume 2 costs $1,995 and is available as a free trial download.