iPS 206: Build Special 1: Embeddinator 4000 with James Montemagno This episode is live at the Microsoft Build 2017 in Seattle with Andrew Madsen and Jaim Zuber. We have James Montemagno from the Mobile Developers Tools Team at Microsoft. Tune in and learn more about Embeddinator 4000! [00:01:05] – Introduction to James Montemagno This is James Montemagno’s third time on iPhreaks. He is a Principal Program Manager on the Mobile Developers Tools Team. He is a long-time Xamarin developer for almost 6 years now. [00:01:55] – What is it that you wanted to talk to us about? The Embeddinator 4000 is an open-source project. It falls underneath the Mono open-source. It’s a Github organization so it’s not under Microsoft branding. It’s been around for a while but the team re-tooled it in a way that every single iOS, Android, Mac, Linux, and Windows developers is going to love. Their goal is to bring .NET to every developer. Developers still want to find a way of sharing code. There are a few ways to do it today. You can write a bunch of C++ but no one wants to do that. The Embeddinator has the ability to execute C# and .NET code anywhere. It enables every developer writing applications in any language to take a .NET library to write some business logic. And then, compile that through a tool into a native library that they can consume in Objective-C, Swift, Java, or C++ library. [00:04:20] – C# library, not Xamarin-based It’s not Xamarin-based so you don’t need the Xamarin toolkits. You could use Visual Studio 2017. It’s just a command line tool so you can run it on Mac or PC. You don’t need anything besides the ability to write a C# library. Run that into the Embeddinator, which would then give you a dynamic library if you’re just doing an Objective-C Mac OS app, or it would give you a framework for iOS. [00:07:20] – How do you take a C# / .NET library and give it an Objective-C interface? Each platform whether it’s Objective-C for Mac, for iOS, or Swift for iOS, will be able to create those specific libraries, which will go to their own tooling.  Obviously, the syntax is different. There are some things in C# that don’t necessarily exist in Objective-C. So it has to be converted into a call block or maybe you’ll not write that type of code because you know you’re going to consume this library. All the code is open-source on the Github page. You can think of it that it is going to provide the native interfaces and then, kind of P/Invoking into the compiled-up run time or the machine code that’s there. [00:09:00] – Difference from Microsoft Windows Bridge for iOS That bridge application is focused on iOS applications, specifically, on games. These games are brought over into to a UWP application. On the other hand, Embeddinator is very powerful for companies which are literally doing the same thing over and over again. This also allows collaboration with other teams. If mobile developers are calling their mobile API, they could just have one shared mobile API that’s being called across each platform. The difference here is you’re not porting any application, you’re creating a common framework or a common element that’s going to be running natively on each platform. You’re first writing it in C#, and then, embedding it into each application. [00:12:05] – Libraries and frameworks available All of .NET is available to them. When they’re creating .NET libraries, Embeddinator supports almost everything in .NET 4.6, which is a large amount of .NET. It can be embedded into your applications. [00:13:15] – What else is brought in? What you’ll see inside of this framework is a bunch of registers and header files.  The bindings that get created are all here. It will create the header files that will talk and communicate to that framework specifically. It's executing .NET code based on the device you’re running it on - ARM32, ARM64, i386, your simulators, x86, x64-bit. [00:14:40] – Is there a reason you’re not using...