Xamarin Continuous Integration and Delivery: Team Services, Test Cloud, and HockeyApp

Learn everything you need to set up a full-featured, automated pipeline for Xamarin development and deployment. Automate everything from the build step through to deployment and delivery to your customer. If you thought this level of automation could be achieved only by large companies with generous funding, think again! You as a single developer, or working in a small team or company, can automate your processes to punch heavier than your weight. What’s more, you can achieve this level of automation completely for free!

This hands-on guide takes you step-by-step from setting up your first automated build all the way to integrated unit testing, and finally through to delivering a high-quality app to your testers and end users. The automation presented in this book saves a lot of frustration and recurring work, providing you more time to focus on building the robust and compelling apps that delight your customers and keep you steps ahead of the competition. Not only does this book teach how to get a grip on consistent quality, but it covers the use of HockeyApp to track events and usage, and to report errors and anomalies back to home base for developers to investigate. Many times it’s possible to detect and fix errors before a user even notices they are there.

This book:

• Teaches the necessity of an automated development pipeline
• Helps you set up an automated pipeline for Xamarin development
• Integrates testing (on physical devices!) to ensure high-quality apps

What You’ll Learn

• Why you want an automated development pipeline
• Obtain and configure the automated tooling
• Continuously integrate your apps
• Run automated unit tests
• Push updates to your customers
• Monitor and detect errors without user intervention

Who This Book Is For

App developers looking for ways to ensure consistent quality of work and wanting to know how their apps are doing in actual use by customers

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Why an Automated Pipeline?
Chapter 2: Establishing the Prerequisites
Chapter 3: Creating Your First Build
Chapter 4: Customizing Your Builds
Chapter 5: Creating and Running Tests with Xamarin Test Cloud
Chapter 6: Integrating Tests into Your Builds
Chapter 7: Preparing for Distribution
Chapter 8: Releasing Your App
Chapter 9: A Closer Look at HockeyApp
Chapter 10: Where to Go from Here
Appendix: Alternative Tooling