Does Xamarin have your trust?

At the Twin Cities .NET User Group on Thursday night I saw three lightning talks. Adam Zucchi gave talk 2 of 3 on Xamarin Essentials. Alright, this had just been the pet GitHub project of a James Montemagno for some time, but now Microsoft has bought it and there has been an official version 1 release. You may get Xamarin Essentials as a NuGet package and then just reference it in a project within a Visual Studio solution (the NuGet package install will really do this for you) and finally, of course, include a namespace reference to it at wherever in your own code you may wish to use it. In other words the setup is easy and everything you'd expect as a .NET developer. Adam didn't break into goofy XML configurations or anything like that. So what does this do? It allows you to interact with some of the more esoteric trappings of a smartphone (as suggested in this IoT tech talk I saw in Orlando) such as the Accelerometer. Magnetometer/Compass? Flashlight? Gyroscope? Battery? Clipboard? Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. In looking back at a photo I took from my phone at one of Adam's slides I see "Barometer" on his list too. I had to Google against this for as to why I would care and I suppose that if one can measure atmospheric pressure that one can estimate altitude. In the first photo here a saleswoman named Jen Simon is shown standing while William Austin tries to iron out the kinks of her slideshow presentation. She gave a talk on sales in general and cornerstone to her presentation was emphasizes on building trust and being honest. Her talk was last and immediately following Adam's talk she piggybacked onto his topic and posed the question: "Does Xamarin have your trust?" I guess I trust it more now that I can access more than just the camera and maps/geolocation stuff from Xamarin. The notion that I could go off into the weeds with some of this wacky stuff that I'll probably never touch does make it seem posh instead of Mickey Mouse. The prohibitive negative for .NET peeps used to PCs is that you yet really need a Macintosh to work with it (per this). Mark Kalal gave the first of the three lightning talks. His talk was just on a bunch of silly products. The one I found the most interesting was a keyboard from Microsoft that could fold in half. You can see it here. I suppose this device that allowed one to either plug into the two prong European electric ports or the American states-side electrical socket was pretty neat as well. In this last picture, Mark is pictured at left, Adam in the center, and at right is Jason Erdahl of ILM Services who was the main host for the night. ILM itself of course is the venue which hosts the event.