RFD8500 Development using Xamarin

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R Rick Elliott 2 years 11 months ago
33 4 0

We just recently purchased the RFD8500 scanner for one of our production facilities to scan RFID tags on our production line.  We need to develop a small Android application to acquire the RFID information and send it to our system for use as we can't use the RFID scanning in the native browser on the Symbol Android device paired with it.  Since we're not a Java shop, we've been trying to use Xamarin to wrap the scanning SDK for consumption in a C# application.  However, so far our efforts haven't been successful - the SDK appears to return Success statuses on our calls to the various initialization and other functions, but we can't retrieve a list of the available scanners on the device.
 
Does anyone know if Xamarin development is supported for use with the RFD8500 SDK?  If so, are there any examples available where it has been used that we could look at?  Any help would be appreciated.  Thanks.

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4 Replies

A Atin Agarwal

hi guys,

i want to develop applications using RFD8500 on Xamarin IOS, Xamarin Android and Xamarin Win 8.1 project.
I have already developed all these 3 applications supporting TSL 1128 reader and now want my applications to support RFD8500 as well..

are there any sample applications that i can look to get started in either of the 3 platforms?

for Xamarin IOS and Xamarin Android, i would need to create bindings for Xamarin. Does anyone have such bindings created?

Please help,

Thanks,
Atin...

D Daniel Pulman

Rick, which version of Scanner for Android have you binded? I have tried the last one (2.0.8) and when I build the "Binding Library" project I get this error:

Error    CS0234    The type or namespace name 'GenerateBarcode128B' does not exist in the namespace 'Com.Zebra.Scannercontrol' (are you missing an assembly reference?)

R Rick Elliott

So after getting nowhere on the Xamarin front, I decided to install Android Studio and delve into the SDK sample application to see if I could figure out what I was doing wrong.  After a few days of learning, today I finally tracked down the missing piece and it's fairly critical to accessing the scanner.  The Bluetooth services of the Android device must be discovered by the application and provided for the scanner SDK to consume.  As I was following the Zebra Scanner SDK for Android Developer Guide and it didn't show or explain this process, I was under the mistaken impression that the scanner SDK had the Bluetooth device discovery built into the SDK initialization / setup functions.  My Java app that I created exhibited the same problem that I experienced with my Xamarin app, so I knew there had to be something I was missing.  Thank goodness for the sample app -- it took a few days to pull it apart, but without it I would have been completely lost by just following the guide.

Unless I've missed it, the Android Developer Guide should be updated to explain this part of the process, specifically the code in the HomeActivity and underlying framework pieces in BaseActivity in the sample app.  My next step is to take what I've learned and see if I can transfer it back to Xamarin, as I'm far more comfortable in .NET/C# world and this will be a living enterprise app that my other dev coworkers may need to maintain.

My other concern is I don't see RFID scanning in the sample app and I haven't seen any references on how to get that working through the SDK in any documentation.  I'm not sure if it uses the same bar code structures or not.  If anyone has Java samples for RFID scanning using the SDK, I would gratefully receive them.  Thanks.

P Pietro Francesco Maggi

Hi Rick,
we don't support officially Xamarin with the Scanner SDK for Android that is used for the RFD8500, however we've partner that have applications in production built using it.

If your company is registered as an ISV with Zebra, you can request support (depending where are you based we've different support centers): Contact Tech Support

Regarding your current test, have you built a xamarin binding for the Scanner SDK and it does not works as expected?

~Pietro

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