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)

Adding a sign in page


In order to add sign in capabilities to our app, we need to create a new Page and a new ViewModel. The ViewModel will be pretty straightforward, containing just a single command that handles signing in to Facebook via the IAuthService, passing the received Facebook token to the Azure backend service through the ITripLogDataService, and then storing the Azure access token in local settings.

Note

There are a couple of ways to tap into the local storage platform-specific APIs to store settings. One way is to roll your own, similar to how we did the location service: creating a core interface that is implemented uniquely per platform. Another alternative is to leverage a plugin or other third party component that has been published. In this section, we will use a plugin called Settings Plugin for Xamarin and Windows, available on NuGet as Xam.Plugins.Settings by James Montemagno. There are also several other types of plugins made available by members of the Xamarin community...