Free event, for the community, by the community. October 19th 2018
Expert Day for Xamarin
New Topics
Our experts will tell you all about the latest and greatest for Xamarin
Awesome speakers
Our speakers come from all around the world, just to share their knowledge and experience with you!
Lots of fun
This day will be a lot of fun with good sessions, great friends and memorable conversations
SPEAKERS
Underneath you will find the first speakers for the 2018 edition!
PROGRAM
Check out our awesome line-up below!
The full schedule is here! Isn’t this an awesome line-up or what? We are still awaiting a few session titles.
8:00 - 9:00
Register, walk-in
60 mins
9:00 - 9:15
Tobias Hoppenthaler
Welcome talk/introduction
15 mins
Tobias Hoppenthaler

Jim Bennett
Keynote by Jim Bennett: State of the Xamarin – Microsoft Union
It’s been 2 years since a small tech start-up tech from Seattle called Microsoft became a part of the Xamarin family, and this has led to many great things happening in the cross-platform mobile space. This keynote from Xamarin Developer Advocate Jim Bennett covers where we are now with Xamarin development across classic, forms and the tooling, and takes a glimpse into where Xamarin will be going in the future.
45 mins
Jim Bennett

Glenn & Bart
Glenn & Bart: Introduction to the Actor Model through Akka.net
In this session, we'll go through what the actor model is all about and how it solves complex development problems. Afterwards, we'll tackle a small demo with the use of Akka.net on a mobile app with Xamarin. The Actor Model provides a higher level of abstraction for writing concurrent and distributed systems. It alleviates the developer from having to deal with explicit locking and thread management, making it easier to write correct concurrent and parallel systems. Akka.NET is a toolkit and runtime for building highly concurrent, distributed, and fault tolerant event-driven applications.
50 mins
Glenn & Bart

Geert van der Cruijsen
Geert van der Cruijsen: Bots are the new Apps? Building chatbots from idea to production.
In this session Geert will explain how to build your own bots using .Net, C#, Azure and the Microsoft Bot Framework. During the session we will cover all areas involved in building a successful production ready bot. Starting from the initial idea to getting a prototype working as fast as possible to actually running it in production on channels such as skype, facebook or telegram. After this session you'll be fully ready to build your own bot that will conquer the world (if Sarah Connor doesn't stop it)
50 mins
Geert van der Cruijsen
12:00 - 13:00
Lunch
60 mins
13:00 - 13:50
Mike James
Keynote by Mike James: TBD
50 mins
Mike James

Kerry W. Lothrop
Kerry W. Lothrop: Sharing is caring: Getting the most out of .NET Code Sharing
In the olden days, everything was simple: You use C# to write .NET applications that run under Windows. Nowadays, there are many possible target platforms that will run .NET applications, from UWP or Windows Store to iOS, Android, macOS, Linux, or even Tizen. To not re-implement your app for every platform there are many different code sharing strategies: Portable Class Libraries, Shared Projects, File Linking, .NET Standard, .NET Core. The talk will give you all the information you need to make the technology decision for your next project, enabling you to maximize your code sharing. Kerry is a Principal Consultant at Zühlke. He works on projects connecting cloud backends to mobile phones to embedded devices. He runs the Xamarin User Group in Frankfurt. He has received the Xamarin MVP award.
50 mins
Kerry W. Lothrop

Luce Carter
Luce Carter: I don’t speak German – How Cognitive Services helps me on my travels
As a Microsoft MVP and possessor of a UK passport, Luce is blessed with opportunities to speak all over the UK and now Europe. In this ta,lk she discusses how Xamarin and Microsoft Cognitive Services have allowed her to engage more with locals and not worry that she is only fluent in English.
50 mins
Luce Carter
16:00 - 16:50

Mark Allibone
Mark Allibone: Xamarin Everywhere
Out of the box Xamarin Forms enables you to target Android, iOS and UWP/Windows 10. But thanks to an ever growing community effort you can easily expand your reach and target platforms such as WPF, macOS, Linux, your Samsung TV and even the web. Breaking out of a mobile only world comes with it's own sets of challenges when it comes to the UI. During this session we will see how we can extend Xamarin Forms to target new platforms, scale your UI and avoid a UX nightmare.
50 mins
Mark Allibone
17:00- 18:00
Closing keynote, socializing and drinks 🍻
60 mins
8:00 - 9:00
Register, walk-in
60 mins
9:00 - 9:15
Tobias Hoppenthaler
Welcome talk/introduction
15 mins
Tobias Hoppenthaler

Jim Bennett
Keynote by Jim Bennett: State of the Xamarin – Microsoft Union
It’s been 2 years since a small tech start-up tech from Seattle called Microsoft became a part of the Xamarin family, and this has led to many great things happening in the cross-platform mobile space. This keynote from Xamarin Developer Advocate Jim Bennett covers where we are now with Xamarin development across classic, forms and the tooling, and takes a glimpse into where Xamarin will be going in the future.
45 mins
Jim Bennett

Gerald Versluis
Gerald Versluis: Creating airplane mode proof Xamarin applications
It has never been more important to create apps that also work offline. Mobile app users can flick that 'airplane mode' switch any given time and the cellular connection isn't as stable as it is at home. To ensure a great user-experience you, as a developer, need to account for these scenarios. And honestly: that can be a pain in the butt.
In this session I will show you how to use awesome libraries like Akavache and Polly to create connected apps in a very easy way. Step-by-step I will guide you through a sample application, so when we're done you can go home and implement it in your every app. Have a good flight!50 mins
Gerald Versluis
11:10 - 12:00

Pieter Nijs
Pieter Nijs: Help, my Xamarin app has memory issues!
"How is it possible that your app, written in a managed programming language, has memory issues? After all, isn't it the Garbage Collector's job to release unused or unreachable objects to free up memory? Clearly you are not paging your data, hence the large memory footprint of your app." If you think the above it true, then you are more than welcome to join Pieter's session about finding and fixing memory issues in Xamarin.iOS, Xamarin.Android and Xamarin.Forms! Pieter will investigate and try to find the culprits of different memory leaks, and their motives. This often requires a deep dive into some Xamarin/iOS/Android internals, and spans a lot wider than your basic and typical TableView or ListView optimizations. After this session you should have a good understanding of how and why some types of memory leaks arise, how to search for them and -most importantly- how to avoid them in the future.
50 mins
Pieter Nijs
12:00 - 13:00
Lunch
60 mins
13:00 - 13:50
Mike James
Keynote by Mike James: TBD
50 mins
Mike James

Robin-Manuel Thiel
Robin-Manuel Thiel: Continuous Everything with Azure DevOps
A deep dive into setting up a real-world end-to-end CI/CD pipeline from scratch. Want to trigger a cloud-hosted build just by checking in code to the master branch? Great, let's talk about Azure DevOps for Xamarin! Starting with automated Builds, over to triggering UI Tests on real devices and finally releasing in multiple stages to Testers first and the App Stores afterward. All, using the new Azure DevOps services.
50 mins
Robin-Manuel Thiel
15:00 - 15:50

Tobias Hoppenthaler
Tobias Hoppenthaler: Pimp your App with Lottie
Like the animations from the Airbnb Apps? Want something like that in your own app? This talk will show you how you can integrate animations with Lottie in your app and where you can get them from if you do not have an Adobe wizard at your disposal. Tobias is a Lead IT Consultant at msg group. He usually works on .net / WPF and Xamarin projects. He runs Xamarin User Group Cologne.
50 mins
Tobias Hoppenthaler
16:00 - 16:50

Thomas Burkhart
Thomas Burkhart: Flutter for the Xamarin developer
50 mins
Thomas Burkhart
17:00- 18:00
Closing keynote, socializing and drinks 🍻
60 mins
venue
The event will be held at the Microsoft office in Cologne
Microsoft Office

Holzmarkt 2
50676 Köln
Germany
REGISTER
Registration for the event will be done through Meetup, please click the button below to be taken to the right page.