Getting Started with Microsoft App Center

all right so I wanted to do a quick video on how on getting started with App Center how you can get set up using for instance the analytics to see how many times your app has been installed which devices so forth as well as Diagnostics help you see where maybe there's problems with your app so that you can be aware of those so if you come to this website here at center MS click on documentation that's where you're going to find out everything you need to know to get started with that Center to get set up you can see there's a lot of services here for doing builds based off your repositories github and so forth you can test it distribute it to user or test groups then there's authentication data push notifications all this is built into Visual Studio App Center but we're gonna first focus on the the last two in each column analytics for getting information about statistics for your app and then the Diagnostics which helps you with crashes err so forth so we're gonna go back here to our App Center page you will need an account so you want to click on get Center you can use your Microsoft account github Facebook Google so forth I already have an account so I'm going to click on that here at the bottom I'm going to sign-in and when you first sign up it will ask you for a name for instance if I come over here to my settings it's gonna ask you basically for a username so you're gonna want to put that in you can put in whatever you want and then you're set up you've come to this page and you're you're good to go before you can integrate apps in it into your app you need to create an app here in app center sounds confusing but it's very simple click on this add new app button enter a name we're gonna call it app center demo and this one will be iOS I like to put the DOE s at it at the end because you have to create one app per platform regardless if you're doing across platform development in Visual Studio or not so we'll click the app center demo - OS is our name we're gonna do a release of production that's fine our OS is iOS and then our platform what are we using I'm using xamarin and we'll click add new app and just that simple you have your app created and this is what your app will communicate to provide the analytics and so forth and so here where it mentions add app Center's SDK to your app it mentions a few things you need to do now this is if you're using xamarin iOS for example if you're using xamarin forms you click on this button here and then you can add all this information here into your app saml dot CS file so we're gonna do that but before we do that we want to create another app so we're gonna go back to our name here at the top we're going to add a new app here to the top right and same thing at center demo this time Android and we'll select production as well our our OS will be Android and you notice when I click on Android this top option changes Java Kotlin versus Objective C Swift so we'll click on Android again we're using xamarin and we'll click add new app so same thing present with the same information but this time that the this xamarin tab is specifically for Android so it goes into the main activity but since we're using xamarin forms we'll click on that and so now we need to copy this code over into our visual studio app so we'll create a new app open up App Center here we'll create a new project and I'm gonna call this app center demo and then here under project types I've selected mobile and that's what gives us this cross-platform zaman forms now of course you can search for it but it's just easier to change your platform to or your project type to mobile so we'll select the mobile app zaman forms and click Next and App Center demo actually I didn't need to do epicenter demo in the first that was a search box I got that wrong so we can copy to repos directory or wherever we want to copy it to that's fine we'll create this and you'll need to go through to really understand this hopefully you already understand setting up a file new project shell is a new form or a new project for our demonstration today we'll just use a blank app we can go ahead and add UWP for our blank app it currently is not supported with shell as you notice but just for this purpose for demonstration purposes we can add it just to show you that how the the App Center works across all three platforms will give our project a second to spin up while that's working we're going to want to go into our app zamel dot CSV file and we want to use these using statements at the top so we'll just click on copy to clipboard here go back over to visual studio and we're going to set up our startup project as our Android project alright so we're going to come into our app zamel CS file before we do this we do need to add the sdk to our project if i go back over to my instructions here it does say add the new get packages right so we're going to do that where i click on our solution manage nougat packages have an update let's cancel that and then under browse we're going to do a search for App Center we want these this main one we want to install that into all of our projects so we'll install that first and we'll accept and then we're going to select our analytics here and same thing and all our projects will install that and accept and then finally we're gonna do crashes will select crashes and install that now you'll notice there's others there's the distribute there's push there's data except that there's data there's off if you scroll down a little bit I believe there's some other ones for now we're just going to get started with analytics and crashes which crashes is our Diagnostics over an app center it used to be called crashes they've changed the name so we can close this down and up here at the top I already copied our using statements so I'm just gonna paste those in right click paste there's our using statements now we'll go back over to our instructions easier this way and we're gonna copy this app Center into our unstart method we want to copy this entire thing what this is doing is it's giving us by default our Android secret app secret our uwp and our iOS we'll have to copy those in and then we have type of analytics and crashes so let's go ahead and copy this to clipboard we'll come back over here in our on start we will simply paste that in here so we have our Android app secret we need to find our iOS app secret and our UWP so we'll come back over here we'll go to iOS and all we need to do is copy what's in parentheses here so you right click on that and copy go back over to our app here and we'll right-click here we've got this selected and paste that we'll replace that and then we need to do UWP as well we didn't create an app for that so we'll go ahead and do that it will create a new app app Center demo and UWP production windows UWP and that is fine add new app so we want to copy in our code here again this app secret copy that and we'll go back over to visual studio and we'll replace this here and paste and believe it or not that is all we have to do to get started this will when our app starts it will create that communication to our apps that we've created here in App Center and we're doing type of analytics and type of crashes if we want to add others we can do that but for now we're fine we'll save this and let's see I'm gonna pull up my my phone here and visor will view this and we'll let this run over here so we will press play here give this a second to deploy make sure my camera is not covering that make this a little bit larger and this does work in the Android emulator it also will work in the iOS simulator because all it's doing is communicating to the back end but when we get into other things which we'll discuss layer like authentication we will need to use actual devices but if you were using an emulator this would work as well so we'll give this a second to deploy and it's deploying succeeded it should start here in a second and it's just going to say welcome to Zaman forms nice and simple nothing much to it but notice if we go back over to our app center here and we go over to our Android app now we can click on our analytics tab and it's gonna pull in analytics I have one device connected it's an LG g6 it tells me the device it tells me what version down here at the bottom version of the app they're using what language it also tells me the OS so this is on 26 it looks like of the Android SDK so that is app center for Android let's go back over here we'll stop this very quickly we'll deploy this locally on our Windows machine so we'll do our local machine set uwp as our startup device I'll get that just a second and if you notice when I come over to my uwp and I go into analytics there's nothing there right but now that my app starting up again it's gonna come up say welcome to App Center no it's not it's gonna say welcome to xamarin forms there we go now if I come over here and refresh this I should have analytics Oh well there's trying let's go ahead and we'll come back to that and in the meantime we'll try our iOS simulator so I have my Mac here hopefully my everything's up-to-date we'll switch this over to an iPhone simulator and we'll start that so it's building that currently give it a second should start up my iOS simulator here in a second Oh says bill succeeded let's try this again something happened there we go now it's gonna start my similar and again we should get a welcome to Zaman forms if you were to try this on an actual if you were to try this on an actual iOS device you would need to make sure it's provisioned within your developer account before you could use an actual device so that's it's just easier for now to use the simulator welcome to Zaman forms we can stop that and we'll go back over will refresh this view WPC if that came in there we go so our uwp is showing our statistics now it's showing our OS of Windows 10 dot whatever the device that the app version number languages etc so let's go over to iOS now and we should see the same information same type of information under analytics here again one device it's a simulator even though is that so that's nice it knows the OS version and again the active users what version of the app they're using so there you have it Microsoft App Center I do encourage you to go over to the App Center documentation let's pull that up real quick because I want to show you an under analytics you can do custom events so if you want some more information on custom events you'll want to click on this link here and it shows you how you can do custom events and if we come back to our Diagnostics one nice thing that we can do here is we can inside a try-catch enclosure we can track our errors so for instance it gives us this block of code we can do a try and then here's our catch and all we have to do is do a tract air with the exception or if we won't put something else in there we can and that will track in App Center right now if you notice if we go back into App Center if we go into one of our apps under Diagnostics there is nothing because we haven't crashed right but it also shows us here how we can how we can keep track of that so that's App Center and a nutshell very easy to get started tracking your analytics statistics diagnostics and crashes and another video we'll go into a little bit more detail on some of these other features but appreciate taking time to watch this and please leave your comments below either on youtube or here on my blog thank you

Channel: ttirrell

Views: 8,841

Rating: 4.8333335 out of 5

Keywords: Xamarin, XamarinForms, App Center, iOS, Android, UWP, Analytics, Diagnostics

Id: cc1mx8cGoqg

Length: 18min 22sec (1102 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 01 2019