Microsoft’s App Center (https:\/\/appcenter.ms\/apps) allows us to do several things, including build and distribution of our application(s), but what I’m interested in for this post, is the capabilities which allow us to monitor some usage information, tracing events and viewing exceptions.<\/p>\n
Within App Center you need to create an application and tell App Center what OS and Platform is being used and it will respond by supplying you with information on how to “embed” App Center code into your application.<\/p>\n
Once we’ve created an application in App Center we’ll be supplied with a key (currently you need a key per OS application).<\/p>\n
Let’s now create a simply test application using Xamarin.Forms, although you can create a standard UWP application if you prefer.<\/p>\n
Note: at this time WPF does not seem to be fully supported.<\/em><\/p>\n Creating our Xamarin.Forms application<\/strong><\/p>\n Inside the shared project, edit the App.xaml.cs adding the following using clauses<\/p>\n and within the OnStart, add the following code<\/p>\n For each platform you need to create a new application key within App Center. If you are only intending to create a single platform version of your application, for example a UWP application, you can use the following instead<\/p>\n If we now run our application, App Center will start to log each time the application is run along with information regarding the OS being used, but what if we want to start to track certain usage, for example to find out if a feature is actually being used.<\/p>\n Exceptions and crash reporting<\/strong><\/p>\n Crash\/Exception reporting is enabled by default but obviously if you’re running inside the Debugger in Visual Studio, this may intercept such exceptions before they get sent to the App Center, so if your using a mobile device, you’ll need to actually deploy the application to test any exception handling.<\/p>\n However in instances where we want to both handle an exception (probably most cases) and log\/track the exception we use code like the following<\/p>\n We can also supply a dictionary with additional information to TrackError, for example<\/p>\n Tracking events<\/strong><\/p>\n To track events, simple add the following line (obviously replacing the text with whatever you want to see in App Center when an event occurs).<\/p>\n we can also supply more information to the event tracking, by supplying a dictionary to the TrackEvent method, for example<\/p>\n Turning Analytics on\/off<\/strong><\/p>\n Obviously you might want to have a configuration option which allows a user to opt-in\/out of analytics, simply use<\/p>\n\n
\r\nusing Microsoft.AppCenter;\r\nusing Microsoft.AppCenter.Analytics;\r\n<\/pre>\n
\r\nAppCenter.Start(\r\n "android=ANDROID_KEY;" +\r\n "uwp=UWP_KEY;" +\r\n "ios=IOS_KEY",\r\n typeof(Analytics), \r\n typeof(Crashes));\r\n<\/pre>\n
\r\nAppCenter.Start(UWP_KEY,\r\n typeof(Analytics), \r\n typeof(Crashes));\r\n<\/pre>\n
\r\ntry\r\n{\r\n \/\/ do something\r\n}\r\ncatch(Exception e) \r\n{\r\n Crashes.TrackError(e);\r\n}\r\n<\/pre>\n\r\ntry\r\n{\r\n \/\/ do something\r\n}\r\ncatch(Exception e) \r\n{\r\n Crashes.TrackError(e, new Dictionary<string, string>\r\n {\r\n { "WithFile", filename }\r\n });\r\n}\r\n<\/pre>\n\r\nAnalytics.TrackEvent("New Feature Used");\r\n<\/pre>\n\r\nAnalytics.TrackEvent("New Feature Used", new Dictionary<string, string>\r\n{\r\n { "WithFile", filename }\r\n});\r\n<\/pre>\n\r\nAnalytics.SetEnabledAsync(false);\r\n<\/pre>\n