Xamarin Evolve is an annual mobile developer conference that is held by Xamarin: the company behind the Xamarin platform, which enables you to develop native iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows apps from a shared C# codebase. Every year at Evolve they come up with new ideas to engage more than a thousand developers and users of their technology who this year flew down to Atlanta, Georgia to attend over 70 sessions on the Xamarin platform and share their experience with C#. This time Xamarin decided to leverage beacons to gamify the event with the Evolve Quest app.
As befits a company building tools for C# developers, Xamarin used their own platform to create the app for iOS and Android. They scattered more than 50 beacons around the conference venue and centered the whole experience around the idea of an adventure: the Evolve Quest. Taking the journey required finding the beacons in a scavenger hunt and the completing fun activities at the end of each stage. Those included testing Google Cardboard, racing robots, answering trivia questions, and more.
Completing the quest did demand some time and effort, but still almost half of more than 1,200 Evolve attendees jumped in. And the reward was worth it. Those who successfully went through the journey were given an exclusive Xamarin Evolve 2014 plush monkey.
Xamarin Evolve Quest was developed not only to engage the conference attendees, but also to serve as a showcase of the platform’s flexibility and potential. On top of that, Xamarin folks are strong believers in open source, so all those of you looking into building beacon-enabled apps with C# can already find the full codebase for the Evolve Quest on GitHub. And there’s more! Check our blog for a step-by-step tutorial to building an iBeacon app with Xamarin!