Creating Xamarin application packages

Once our application is ready to be tested on real devices, we can start preparing the pipeline so that we can compile and package the application to be deployed to our alpha and beta environments on App Center. Azure DevOps provides out-of-the-box templates for both the Xamarin.Android and Xamarin.iOS applications. These pipelines can be extended to include additional testing and static analysis.

Using Xamarin build templates

Creating a build and release template for Xamarin applications is as trivial as using the Xamarin template for iOS and Android. Additionally, the UWP (if your application supports this platform) template can also be used to create a UWP build:

Figure 14.8 – Xamarin Build Tasks

Once the pipeline has been created, we will need to make several small adjustments to both platforms in order to prepare the application so that we can put it on real devices.

Xamarin.Android build

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