Building Native GIS Apps for Mobile Devices using C# and Xamarin

ThinkGeo vehicle tracking and weather on androids

Are you a .NET developer looking to build native GIS applications for iOS and Android devices? Map Suite for Mobile is a .NET control built on top of Xamarin which allows you add interactive maps and professional-grade GIS to your mobile apps. Of course you can build mobile apps around online mapping providers like Google or Bing, but there are scenarios where you might need more powerful spatial features, custom rendering, require editing or consuming data stored on the local device. In this case ThinkGeo’ s Map Suite for iOS and Map Suite for Android would be more appropriate and not limited to the APIs of online mapping providers.

Using the power of Xamarin and Map Suite together, you can develop native full featured GIS applications. Xamarin is a great tool that allows .NET developers to write mobile applications in C#. Xamarin is integrated in Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 and Map Suite supports Xamarin.Forms which allows you to share the vast majority of your code between your iOS and Android projects making the code much easier to maintain in the long-term. As mobile devices become more and more powerful, the need for full featured mobile GIS applications is becoming increasingly important. Why not utilize your existing C# skills to build these native apps instead of learning a whole new toolset for each platform? For existing Map Suite customers it’s even easier as you can use the same Core APIs which you are already familiar with to build native GIS apps.

To get started visit the samples and resources page. The samples come with several C# sample projects for both iOS and Android editions. To get ideas of what all functionally is possible, you can download the Android sample applications directly to your device.

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