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Xamarin.Auth confusion with Xamarin.Forms

GerardvanderLindenGerardvanderLinden AUMember ✭
in Xamarin.Forms

Hey guys,

I seem somewhat confused with how something like Xamarin.Auth will fit into a Xamarin.Forms project.

I understand having to create a renderer in iOS and Android for the login and so forth. Thats cool and working. However my problem has to do with the Accounts structure in Xamarin.Auth. Such as I thought I would be able to call Accounts from my main PCL project and it would work fine across all platforms.

However I get a unsupported platform error when running the code, for example running my Forms application for Android. Is this a usual result ? I am confused as to why it wouldnt just use the Android define and run fine if selected Android project to run. Any ideas ?

I mean isnt this why there is a Xamarin.Auth portable library and libraries for iOS and Android so that it is cross platform... Or will this not behave as I would have thought with Forms ?

Posts

  • CraigDunnCraigDunn USXamarin Team Xamurai
    edited August 2014

    Xamarin.Auth isn't actually structured that well for Xamarin.Forms, as there is no portable library that contains the core Account and other classes. Instead they are in a regular .NET assembly (see screenshot) so if you are trying to reference this assembly from a PCL or from an iOS or Android application that is probably the reason. Those files are all file-linked into the iOS and Android assemblies (and sadly there's no existing Windows Phone code with a platform-specific authentication UI yet).

    image

    A quick test indicates the core code isn't quite ready to be made portable - a couple of classes like BinaryFormatter and others in System.Cryptography aren't available in PCL Profile 78. These problems could probably be solved with DependencyService if you wanted to take a crack at it (since Xamarin.Auth is open source). This would then enable the Accounts and other classes to be accessible in your PCL.

    Bringing features from our existing open-source projects into Xamarin.Forms is something that we'd love to do over time, but for now Xamarin.Auth doesn't work "out of the box" with Xamarin.Forms.

  • GerardvanderLindenGerardvanderLinden AUMember ✭

    ahhh ok, at least I now have a better idea of how it works....

    thanks for the info... much appreciated... I might have a bit of a play and see if I can make it work better with Xamarin.Forms.. :)

  • FedexFedex USUniversity ✭

    I was looking for the same thing, here I found a working solution in the meantime http://www.joesauve.com/using-xamarin-auth-with-xamarin-forms/

  • GerardvanderLindenGerardvanderLinden AUMember ✭

    Oh thats awesome, thanks for the link!! :)

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