Chapter 1, Xamarin and Mono – a Pathway to the Unnatural, provides an overview of the Mono project and the suite of Mono-based commercial products offered by Xamarin.

Chapter 2, Demystifying Xamarin.iOS, describes how Mono and the iOS platform coexist and allow developers to build iOS apps using C#.

Chapter 3, Demystifying Xamarin.Android, describes how Mono and the Android platform coexist and allow developers to build Android apps using C#.

Chapter 4, Developing Your First iOS App with Xamarin.iOS, walks you through the process of creating, compiling, running, and debugging a simple iOS app.

Chapter 5, Developing Your First Android App with Xamarin.Android, walks you through the process of creating, compiling, running, and debugging a simple Android app.

Chapter 6, The Sharing Game, presents various approaches of sharing code between Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android apps.

Chapter 7, Sharing with MvvmCross, walks you through the use of the Xamarin.Mobile app, which provides a cross-platform API to access location services, contacts, and the device camera.

Chapter 8, Sharing with Xamarin.Forms, walks you through the basics of using the MvvmCross framework to increase code reuse between platforms.

Chapter 9, Preparing Xamarin.iOS Apps for Distribution, discusses various methods of distributing iOS apps, and walks you through the process of preparing a Xamarin.iOS app for distribution.

Chapter 10, Preparing Xamarin.Android Apps for Distribution, discusses various methods of distributing Android apps, and walks you through the process of preparing a Xamarin.Android app for distribution.

This book contains both Android and iOS examples. The simplest configuration to create and run all the examples is to have an Intel-based Mac running OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) or a later version with Xcode, the iOS SDK 7.x, and Xamarin installed. The 30-day trial edition of Xamarin can be used as it installs both Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android by default.

The following points provide detailed requirements based on specific features and configurations.

To create and execute the iOS examples in this book, you will need the following:

To use the Visual Studio plugin for Xamarin.iOS, you will need the following:

To create and execute the iOS examples in this book, you will need the following:

To use the Visual Studio plugin for Xamarin.Android you will need the following:

This book is a great resource for mobile developers who are already familiar with Android and/or iOS development and need to get up to speed with Xamarin development quickly. It is assumed that you have a background of Android, iOS and C#. The book provides an overview of the Xamarin architecture, walks you through the process of creating and running sample apps, demonstrates the use of tools provided by Xamarin, and discusses special considerations for preparing apps for distribution.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "Set a breakpoint on the SetContentView() statement."

A block of code is set as follows:

protected string GetFilename()
{
  return Path.Combine (
       Environment.GetFolderPath(
           Environment.SpecialFolder.MyDocuments),
          "NationalParks.json");
}

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "From the Project menu, select Publish Android Project."

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