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)

Custom Renderers


One of the paramount features of the Xamarin.Forms toolkit is the layer of abstraction it provides over user interface implementation. With a single API, Xamarin.Forms allows you to use native user interface controls and functionality. For example, the Entry class at runtime will display a UITextField view on iOS, an EditText widget on Android, and a TextBox control on Windows. The toolkit does this by using a concept called Renderers. The renderers correspond with the visual elements—controls, pages, and layouts—within the API. So, for example, there is an EntryRenderer that is responsible for rendering instances of the Entry class down to the platform-specific versions of that control.

The beauty of this renderer concept is that you can subclass the various renderer classes to override how a specific element is translated at runtime. So, for example, if you wanted all textboxes in your app (that is, every time you display an Entry element) to be completely borderless, you...