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.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Mastering Cross-Platform Development with Xamarin
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Under the hood


As previously mentioned, Xamarin, being a cross-platform development framework, provides developers the toolset to create applications that depend on and use the same code base. The shared amount of code is directly proportional to the manageability in these types of implementation.

Xamarin.Forms adds an abstraction layer on top of the mono runtime on Android and the pre-compiler .NET stack on iOS platforms. This abstraction layer's sole responsibility is to provide the Xamarin compilers with the necessary instructions to normalize the code or markup for GUI elements to render native controls in Xamarin apps. Since the platform language for Xamarin is C#, Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) is the design markup language of choice. Xamarin.Forms provides the same abstraction as a runtime library for Windows Store applications.

The abstraction layer provided by Xamarin.Forms makes use of the similar UI elements and layout patterns which were illustrated in the previous...