Introducing Azure Communication Services UI Library to Xamarin

Overview

A few months ago we released the Azure Communication Services UI Library for iOS & Android (https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-communication-services/azure-communication-services-ui-library-now-available-for-ios/ba-p/3556319). Today we are excited to share our first efforts with Cross-Platform development. To help empower more mobile developers around the world we have created a Xamarin sample to showcase how to introduce calling capabilities into their current applications. 

The sample will walk through steps on how Xamarin developers can create a binding for the iOS and Android platform. These binding libraries allow a Xamarin application to consume and third-party native library. 

Using the Samples 

The great thing about our sample repo is that developers can just dive into our repo and take our bindings as is and include them in their project.  

Developers can check out the contents on XamariniOSBindings. There is a pre-built proxy library that bridges the Swift interface to Objective-C already, feel free to copy and edit these to your needs.  There is also a helpful script developers can use to build the FATFrameworks for the bindings.  

CommunicationUIProxy.Binding contains the solution that builds the .dll that can be used in your Xamarin Application. In your applications iOS.csproj you can add our newly created iOS binding .dll under the references folder.  

Learn more about creating iOS bindings here: Walkthrough: Bind an iOS Swift library - Xamarin | Microsoft Docs 

The contents of XamarinAndroidBindings has multiple folders in it.  AzureCore, AzureCommunicationCommon, and CommunicationUILibrary. Each contain their own solution and csproj. Developers can reference these csproj directly in their solution or use the .dll files they generated in their own application. Let's not forget to include our AzureCommunicationCalling .aar as an AndroidAarLibrary build item. 

Learn more about creating Android bindings here: Binding an .AAR - Xamarin | Microsoft Docs 

Now that the binding libraries are included, we can update the source code of the app and use the new public apis.  

Finally! Our app now can launch the UI composite. We now have an audio and video experience embedded into the app.  

Of course, you can always just run our sample solution in the repo, play around and see how things work. You will notice you can launch the experience and it will be identical to how you expect native behavior to be.  

Check out: Azure-Samples/communication-services-ui-library-xamarin: UI sample library on how to create Xamarin bindings (github.com) to learn more!