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[email protected] +1 (855) 926-2746 xamarin.com Xamarin, Inc. 394 Pacific Ave, 4th Floor, San Francisco, CA, 94111 Highlights With only a little familiarity with C#, iOS app development took just 6 weeks. Portable Class Libraries (PCL) accelerated app development and code-sharing. Xamarin provided UI and performance advantages to make the app a success. Xamarin Cuts Development Time by 40% as Sennheiser Creates a New Mobile App For more than 65 years the Sennheiser name has stood for top-quality products, true sound and tailor-made solutions for every aspect of recording, transmission, and repro- duction of sound. Based in Wedemark, Germany, the company has 2,300 employees, factories in Germany, Ireland, and the United States; and sales offices in some 16 countries around the globe. Making Meetings Easier

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[email protected]+1 (855) 926-2746xamarin.comXamarin, Inc. 394 Pacific Ave, 4th Floor, San Francisco, CA, 94111

Highlights

With only a little familiarity with C#, iOS app development took just 6 weeks.

Portable Class Libraries (PCL) accelerated app development and code-sharing.

Xamarin provided UI and performance advantages to make the app a success.

Xamarin Cuts Development Time by 40% as Sennheiser Creates a New Mobile App

For more than 65 years the Sennheiser name has stood for top-quality products, true sound and tailor-made solutions for every aspect of recording, transmission, and repro-duction of sound. Based in Wedemark, Germany, the company has 2,300 employees, factories in Germany, Ireland, and the United States; and sales offices in some 16 countries around the globe.

Making Meetings Easier

[email protected]+1 (855) 926-2746xamarin.comXamarin, Inc. 394 Pacific Ave, 4th Floor, San Francisco, CA, 94111

Solution

The company, which traces its history back to 1945, has earned a reputation for excellence in audio engineering, as well as ease of use. As it prepared to release its new Sennheiser Team-Connect, an end-to-end professional grade meeting solution that integrates speakers, microphones, and a central control unit, the company sought simplicity for its user interface.

Rather than creating a physical control panel, the company decided to put the controls into the user’s hands via an iOS app for iPads and iPhones. “We are making the start of every confer-ence call a stress-free zone,” says Wienand Mensendiek, Manager Portfolio and Channel Development at Sennheiser.

Essential to making that vision come true was creating an iOS app that was comprehensive, yet intuitive, with extreme ease of use. Dirk Eismann, Mobile Application Specialist with the Inte-grated Systems Division of Sennheiser, was tasked with developing the TeamConnect app, and needed to find the best development platform.

TeamCenter was produced by a 7-member team that included hardware specialists, testers, project leads, and other key personnel. But as the lone mobile software developer, the pres-sure was on Eismann to choose a robust development platform

“I had recently begun investigating Xamarin right before the TeamConnect app project was initiated, “ Eismann says. “I knew that Xamarin’s performance advantages over other cross platform tools and its rock-solid support for all of the iOS APIs were just what this project needed.”

Dirk Eismann Mobile Application Specialist, Sennheiser

that would help him create the code as quickly and as cleanly as possible.

While Eismann had experience using Apache Flex, PhoneGap, and pure Objective-C for iOS develop-ment, this was the first Xamarin project for him.

With a long background in Java, and a familiarity with C#, Eismann found it easy to make the tran-sition to Xamarin, and completed the application code within just 6 weeks.

[email protected]+1 (855) 926-2746xamarin.comXamarin, Inc. 394 Pacific Ave, 4th Floor, San Francisco, CA, 94111

Benefits

40% Faster DevelopmentAs with most other companies, time to market was a concern. Sennheiser was eager to get its innovative product out to its customers as soon as possible—a goal that Xamarin helped the company achieve.

“My estimate is that working with Xamarin allowed me to complete the TeamCenter app about 40% faster than if using one of the other development platforms,” Eismann says. “We were able to reduce development time because of many shortcuts C# offers through the language’s semantics and by the fact thatI could use the huge underlying.NET class library for UI and non-UI related code.”

Precisely Mapped APIsDevelopment efforts also benefitted from the Xamarin API modeling of the iOS APIs.

Xamarin allows me to adjust the UI according to the targeted platform—as the Xamarin API maps the specific platform API,” says Eismann. “This proved to be a huge time saver.”

“With Xamarin, each target-specific API is mapped by the corresponding Xamarin API—such as the Xamarin.iOS or Xamarin.Android—through the wrappers. For example, all iOS framework APIs—such as UIKit and Core Graphics—have their corresponding C# Namespace in Xamarin, and basically all iOS classes, properties andmessages have their C# counterpart as well. So you still deal with UIButton and UILabel in your C# code, but you get to create and use them the C# way.”

Dirk Eismann Mobile Application Specialist, Sennheiser

Ability to Share Code Across PlatformsXamarin provides benefits for Sennheiser projects involving multiple platforms. “Working with Xamarin I can nicely decouple the UI code from the core logic code, and use this non-UI code across projects by using shared portable class libraries,” Eismann says. “This means changes in the common code base take place in just one location, so I don’t need to port code base changes.”

Eismann also values Xamarin integration with under-lying native SDKs. “Integrations with SDKs is very smooth and almost transparent,” Eismann says. “In the end, the Xamarin toolchain produces just the app binaries you need. This means less hassle, and more development fun.”

Eismann estimates that 60% of the TeamCenter application code can be shared if the company decides to port the application to another mobile platform, with the remaining 40% representing UI code that would be created using the Xamarin API targeted for the platform.

“Looking toward the future we see a lot of benefit in using Xamarin for cross-platform projects,” Eismann says. “Xamarin maximizes code sharing. You don’t want to be in the position of having separate code bases for each mobile operating system.”

Ease of UseThe Xamarin platform proved easy to learn and use. “Xamarin makes it surprisingly easy to do native mobile development,” Eismann says. “I especially liked how concepts common to .NET developers like events and delegates are added on top to the iOS API. This greatly simplifies development for anyone who has worked with .NET code.”

Working with Objective-C was also easy. “Another plus with Xamarin is that you can easily port Objective-C sample code to C# as the Xamarin API is modeled along the iOS APIs,” Eismann says.“ This is very good for people with no prior Objec-tive-C experience.”

“Xamarin makes it surprisingly easy to do native mobile development.”