Book Image

Mastering Cross-Platform Development with Xamarin

Book Image

Mastering Cross-Platform Development with Xamarin

Overview of this book

The main goal of this book is to equip you with the required know-how to successfully analyze, develop, and manage Xamarin cross-platform projects using the most efficient, robust, and scalable implementation patterns. This book starts with general topics such as memory management, asynchronous programming, local storage, and networking, and later moves onto platform-specific features. During this transition, you will learn about key tools to leverage the patterns described, as well as advanced implementation strategies and features. The book also presents User Interface design and implementation concepts on Android and iOS platforms from a Xamarin and cross-platform perspective, with the goal to create a consistent but native UI experience. Finally, we show you the toolset for application lifecycle management to help you prepare the development pipeline to manage and see cross-platform projects through to public or private release.

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Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Mastering Cross-Platform Development with Xamarin
Mastering Cross-Platform Development with Xamarin
Credits
Credits
About the Authors
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Developing with Xamarin
Developing with Xamarin
Cross-platform projects with Xamarin
Target platforms
Setting up the development environment
Emulator options
A typical Xamarin solution structure
Quality in cross-development
Summary
2
Memory Management
Memory Management
Application Component lifecycle
Garbage collection
Platform-specific concepts
Troubleshooting and diagnosis
Patterns and best practices
Summary
3
Asynchronous Programming
Asynchronous Programming
Multithreading on Xamarin
Asynchronous methods
Parallel execution
Patterns and best practices
Background tasks
Summary
4
Local Data Management
Local Data Management
Data in mobile applications
Application data
Local filesystem
SQLite
Patterns and best practices
Backup/Roaming
Summary
5
Networking
Networking
Connected apps
Web services
SignalR
Patterns and best practices
Platform-specific concepts
Cloud integration
Summary
6
Platform Extras
Platform Extras
Content sharing
Peripherals
Location data
Native libraries
Summary
7
View Elements
View Elements
Design philosophy
Design elements
User interaction
Summary
8
Xamarin.Forms
Xamarin.Forms
Under the hood
Components
Extending forms
Patterns and best practices
Summary
9
Reusable UI Patterns
Reusable UI Patterns
Visual assets
Localization
Architectural patterns
Summary
10
ALM – Developers and QA
ALM – Developers and QA
Development pipeline
Troubleshooting and diagnostics
Unit testing
UI testing
Summary
11
ALM – Project and Release Management
ALM – Project and Release Management
Source control
Continuous integration
Automated testing
Beta deployment
Live telemetry
Summary
12
ALM – App Stores and Publishing
ALM – App Stores and Publishing
Release packages
Distribution options
Line of Business apps
Summary
Index
Index

SQLite

SQLite database implementations provide a relational persisted data structure in mobile application projects. Unlike the general server/client model that is used by relational databases, SQLite is a local database implementation and the data is stored in application local storage. Both Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android application projects can include a SQLite database and associated implementations.

In order to use SQLite, developers are to choose to between the cross-platform implementation of ADO.Net, where the SQL queries are supposed to be created and included as plain text, or use the linq-2-entities access model of the SQLite.Net portable class library. It is available as a NuGet package and a component.

SQLite.Net PCL

For the following demonstration, we will use the asynchronous version of the SQLite.Net library.

Implementation of the SQLite data access layer with SQLite.Net generally follows a code first database programming paradigm. In this pattern, developers first define their...

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