Page 28 - MSDN Magazine, December 15, 2017

APP CENTER
Introducing App Center
Matt Gibbs
App Center is a collection of services that help you build better apps faster. It brings together the beta distribution and crash analytics features of HockeyApp and the Xamarin Test Cloud ability to run application tests on physical devices. It provides cloud build services so that you can have “continuous integration” running for every code committed to a branch. App Center also provides app usage analytics and the ability to segment users and send them push notifications. You can choose to use just one of the services as part of your app development lifecycle, or combine them into a complete DevOps process.
In this article, I show how to get started with the services of App Center to build, test, distribute, monitor and improve your apps. I’ll use an Android app as an example, but you should note that App Center currently supports multiple OSes and development
platforms. The configuration details vary, but the key concepts are the same.
Create an App Center account. Browse to appcenter.ms and select the type of credentials to use. App Center currently supports authenticating with accounts from Microsoft, GitHub, Facebook and Google. Or you can create an account with an e-mail address and App Center password.
Create an App. Click on the New App button and select the Operating System and Platform. OS choices include iOS, Android and Windows. Currently supported development platforms are Xamarin, Java, Objective-C, Swift, React Native and Universal Windows Platform (UWP).
Build
If you’re the only dev working on a project, you may just build everything locally. When there is a team of developers working on a project, you might prefer centralized build support. Instead of maintaining your own lab infrastructure, connect App Center to your source code repository and have it do builds for you. Builds can be triggered manually, or you can use Continuous Integration to have App Center build every time new code is pushed to the branches you specify.
Connect to your repo. The navigation sidebar lists the App Center services. Click Build and select the service that hosts your source code. App Center currently supports Git repositories hosted on Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), Bitbucket and GitHub.
This article discusses:
• Using App Center
• Building an Android app
• Testing in App Center
• Distribution via App Center
• Crash reporting in App Center
• App Center Analytics Technologies discussed:
App Center, Xamarin, Android, JSON
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