XPO and Xamarin 101. A Step by Step beginner’s guide. (Part 1)

“Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” – Martin Luther King

When I first started with XPO I could swear there was something magic involved in how it was handling my data. I had no idea what was going on, but I knew that if I derived my classes from XPObject  or BaseObject (if you use XAF), I automatically had my classes turned into tables in a database of my choosing, I had an autogenerated Built-in OID key,  Deferred Object Deletion, and Optimistic Locking. And honestly, that was all I care about. If I wanted to use a different database; it was as simple as changing my connection string.

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XPO ORM and Xamarin

A quick overview of XPO in Xamarin.

With the current release of XPO v18.1, DevExpress has made XPO available free-of-charge. Xamarin has been open source and free for quite some time, and now with XPO for .NET Core / .NET Standard 2.0 finally out of Beta,  a world of possibilities and new exciting features/projects is opening to us.

Let’s review what exactly that means to us.

If you have used XPO in the past you know the great features it offers:

  • Transparent and Controllable Object Relational Mapping System
  • Bindable and Pageable Object Collections
  • Support for various DB engines (14 to be exact and you can always implement your own XPO connection provider)
  • Advanced Criteria System
  • And More…

Also, it is a mature product with great support that has been around for 15 years. Support is still a paid service but definitely worth it (ask around). Want to see how it compares to EF? Just take a quick look at this simple benchmark.

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