Exception Perceptions: Turning C# into a 5-Star Mobile App with Xamarin

On this episode of Exception Perceptions, Xamarin + Azure Cloud Developer Advocate Brandon Minnick stopped by to chat with Sentry’s Developer Evangelist(a) Chloe Condon about Visual Studio Tools for Xamarin the mobile development platform that lets developers use their C# and .NET skills to build fully native Android, iOS, and UWP apps.

Watch the episode, and read what Brandon has to say about building 5-star apps — and how you can start shipping better apps with Xamarin and Sentry.  

I, like many of us, rely on my apps and I need them to work. Full stop. I don't have time to deal with crashing, freezing, or loading screens. So if an app doesn't work, I quickly uninstall it, search the app stores, and download an alternative. And, I’m not an outlier:

• The average user force-quits an app if it freezes for longer than 3-seconds.

• 23% of users abandon an app after one use.

I'm also a mobile app developer (insert shameless plug for my app), and I recognize the importance of user experience. I need to ensure the best possible experience for my users to make sure they not only come back, or even better, tell their friends about it.

“Is my app crashing?” is one of the — if not the — most important things to know, since it has drastic impacts on if users get a 5-star experience (or not). Luckily, Sentry has a solution.

Crash Reporting for Mobile

Sentry provides support and mobile error monitoring for every major mobile app platform: ObjC/Swift, Java, React Native, and Xamarin, and it's as easy as installing a Cocapod, Gradle Plugin, NPM Package, or NuGet Package and writing one-line of code. That's it!

With the Sentry SDK, I'll get immediate notifications if my app crashes on a user's device and see the complete stack trace, so I know exactly which line of code to investigate fix.

Xamarin + Sentry

Using a combination of Sentry and two Xamarin libraries (Xamarin.Forms and Xamarin.Essentials), I constructed a Xamarin app with Visual Studio for Mac in just a few minutes.

The coolest part? Sentry understands that Xamarin runs on Mono and provides my C# code in the stack trace, along with the native ObjC/Java stack trace.

Want to learn more about Sentry and Xamarin? Visit the official page for this episode. And don't forget to check out our other episodes of Exception Perceptions while you're at it (trust us on this one).