Enabling Xamarin Push Notifications for all platforms

DotNek Software Development 9 minute(s) read

Last updated: Aug 07, 2020

It is quite impossible to talk about the development of mobile applications without Xamarin. It is a major platform for android and mobile applications development introduced by Microsoft. Today Xamarin has a community of about 1.4 million developers.

Introduced in 2001, the developers of Mono organized this platform. Xamarin is an open-source platform that is based on the .NET framework It provides facilities for development within the Microsoft environment. After the declaration of Xamarin as an open-source platform, it became part of Xamarin Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
Xamarin can also be used to send push notifications to the developed applications. It follows typically the same procedure as in sending notifications via Google Firebase
A service Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) is available for sending message notifications and more.

HOW TO ENABLE XAMARIN PUSH NOTIFICATIONS:

Azure notification hub is usually used to send notifications to a Xamarin Android application . These notifications are broadcasted over all the android devices using the Firebase Cloud Messaging feature.

To send push notifications to follow the below-given steps:

1- You have to create a Firebase project and have to enable the Firebase Cloud Messaging feature.
2- Now create a notification hub.
3- Introduce the Xamarin. Android app and develop a connection with the notification hub.
4- Now send test notifications from the Azure portal.

ENABLING FIREBASE CLOUD NOTIFICATION:

1- Sign in to Firebase console and create a new project.

2- Add Firebase to your android application

3- Declare a name for the application, register your app, download googleservices.json.
4- Select project settings, make a selection on the Cloud Messaging option on the top, and save the generated server key.

DEVELOPING A MICROSOFT NOTIFICATION HUB:

1- Sign in to the Azure portal
2- Select the notifications hub in the Mobile section.
3- In the generated page, select add, enter a name, select a value for the location, and an existing resource group.
4- Select the access policies provided.

GENERATING A CONNECTION BETWEEN XAMARIN ANDROID APP AND NOTIFICATION HUB:

1- Create a VS project.
2- Select the file option available, then click on the project.
3- In your project, expand Visual C#, click on Android, and select Android App (Xamarin).
4- Now Declare a name for the project after that select a location and finally select ok to continue with your project.

It is notified that one should have an Azure subscription, a Visual Studio with Xamarin on Windows or Visual Studio for Mac on OS X, and an active Google account.

Some key features of Xamarin include:

- Use of a single language: Xamarin only uses C# as a native tool for the development of mobile-based applications . Unlike other interpreters, it is a go-to precision for building high-performance applications.
- The .NET framework comes across many features like LINQ, Asynchronous programming , Lambdas, and, based on C#, can be used as a tool for better programming aspects.
- Xamarin supports access to the latest APIs to acquire its capabilities in applications such as in ARKit on IOS or Android Multi-Window.