Book Image

Mastering Xamarin.Forms

By : Ed Snider
Book Image

Mastering Xamarin.Forms

By: Ed Snider

Overview of this book

Discover how to extend and build upon the components of the Xamarin.Forms toolkit to develop an effective, robust mobile app architecture. Starting with an app built with the basics of the Xamarin.Forms toolkit, we’ll go step by step through several advanced topics to create a solution architecture rich with the benefits of good design patterns and best practices. We’ll start by introducing a core separation between the app’s user interface and the app’s business logic by applying the MVVM pattern and data binding. Discover how to extend and build upon the components of the Xamarin.Forms toolkit to develop an effective, robust mobile app architecture. Starting with an app built with the basics of the Xamarin.Forms toolkit, we’ll go step by step through several advanced topics to create a solution architecture rich with the benefits of good design patterns and best practices. We’ll start by introducing a core separation between the app’s user interface and the app’s business logic by applying the MVVM pattern and data binding. Then we will focus on building out a layer of plugin-like services that handle platform-specific utilities such as navigation, geo-location, and the camera, as well as how to use these services with inversion of control and dependency injection. Next we’ll connect the app to a live web-based API and set up offline synchronization. Then, we’ll dive into testing the app—both the app logic through unit tests and the user interface using Xamarin’s UITest framework. Finally, we’ll integrate Xamarin Insights for monitoring usage and bugs to gain a proactive edge on app quality.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)

Chapter 4. Platform Specific Services and Dependency Injection

This chapter will not attempt to teach everything there is to know about Inversion of Control (IoC) and dependency injection, as there are numerous resources available that strictly focus on these topics alone. Instead, this chapter will focus on how these patterns apply to mobile development and, more specifically, how to implement them in a Xamarin.Forms mobile app.

Here is a quick look at what we'll cover in this chapter:

  • The need for dependency injection in multi-platform mobile app development

  • Implementing IoC and dependency injection using a third-party library in place of the Xamarin.Forms DependencyService

  • Creating, injecting, and using platform-specific services

  • Updating our TripLog app to use platform-specific services through IoC and dependency injection