Master CI/CD for Xamarin

What you will learn in this course?

In this course, you will learn the fundamentals of CI/CD which is short for Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery and be able to apply these fundamentals in your Xamarin development process.

The word Deployment is often used in place of Delivery but effectively means the same thing.

These skills are essential to maximize your career potential in 2019 and beyond, because more and more companies are adopting these development practices requiring new employees or freelancers to be well versed in these concepts.

What is Continuous Integration (CI) ?

CI is the practice of merging all programmers current working copies to a shared mainline on a regular basis (usually several times a day).

A developer checks out a working copy of the code base prior to making a change.  Over time as other developers check out and make changes, this checked out working copy of the source code base gets out of date, potentially requiring more and more work by developers to actually  check their completed changes back in to the main repository.

Without using CI it can become really difficult to merge all these changes and can lead to it taking more time to  merge changes back into the main source code base than it took to make the the change itself.

CI seeks to eliminate this problem by making sure all developers integrate early and often with the goal to reduce rework and ultimately save cost and time.  This involves all developers merging their code back into the main repository multiple times a day.

An added bonus is that each programmer who is merging changes needs to build and run (and pass) all unit tests which usually run automatically meaning the code base is easier to work with and merge changes into and is potentially more stable as a result.

What is Continuous Delivery or Deployment (CD) ?

This extends CI to ensure that new changes to software can be released to clients quicker, but in a more sustainable way.  It takes the advantages of CI from a development perspective (automated testing, on code check-in, etc) allowing the actual code base to be built and new releases to be automatically released to the client, effectively meaning a new version can be deployed to the client by a click of a button.

CI/CD concepts.

By adhering to a CI/CD development process, the code base can be built and released more quickly, and is in a more stable state overall.  These are some of the reasons why more and more companies are adopting a CI/CD development process in 2019 and beyond.

Key topics in this course.

1. Continuous Integration

2. Continuous Delivery

3. App Center

4. GitHub Pull Requests

5. Branch protection

6. UI Tests

7. App Diagnostics

8. App Analytics

What will you learn?

• Learn how to track errors and crashes in your apps.

• Learn how to track any event triggered within your apps.

• Apply complete CI/CD flows in your app development process.

• Use GitHub to trigger code checks and app distribution to users.

• Use App Center to automate checks and protect important branches.

• Leverage App Center to automatically create builds on every merge.

• Automate the distribution of a new build to beta testers.

• Automate the distribution of new releases to the Apple and Google app stores.

• Learn to create UI tests for your Xamarin Forms apps.

• Focus on the development of features, leave the build and distribution to App Center.

• Improve teamwork with automatic builds and checks that improve the quality of your merges.

• Enable product discovery with the help of Analytics in the App Center.

• Test your app in a wide array of cloud-hosted physical devices.

Differences with other CI/CD courses.

While there are other CI/CD courses out there, most of them are too general. This course is completely tailored to Xamarin developers, this way you can immediately start applying what you learn in your app development process. Because of this, the course also covers topics not normally found on other CI/CD courses, such as UI Tests for Xamarin apps.

Who is the course aimed at?

The course does not require any previous CI/CD or DevOps experience, although some basic Git & GitHub experience is desirable.

While this is a CI/CD course, it is oriented to Xamarin students, so some basic Xamarin experience is required.

Getting started

If you are ready to get started, click on the Enroll or Add to Cart button on this page and start taking your CI/CD skills with
Xamarin to the next level.