Book Image

Xamarin Cross-Platform Development Cookbook

By : George Taskos
Book Image

Xamarin Cross-Platform Development Cookbook

By: George Taskos

Overview of this book

<p>You can create native mobile applications using the Xamarin Forms platform for the three major platforms iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. The advantage of this is sharing as much code as you can, such as the UI, business logic, data models, SQLite data access, HTTP data access, and file storage across the three major platforms.</p> <p>This book provide recipes on how to create an architecture that will be maintainable, extendable, use Xamarin Forms plugins to boost productivity, customize your views per platforms, and use platform-specific implementations at runtime.</p> <p>We start with a simple creation of a Xamarin Forms solution with the three major platforms. We will then jump to XAML recipes and you will learn how to create a tabbed application page, and customize the style and behavior of views for each platform. Moving on, you will acquire more advanced knowledge and techniques while implementing views and pages for each platform and also calling native UI screens such as the native camera page.</p> <p>Further on, we demonstrate the power of architecting a cross-platform solution and how to share code between platforms, create abstractions, and inject platform-specific implementations. Next, you will utilize and access hardware features that vary from platform to platform with cross-platform techniques. Well then show you the power of databinding offered by Xamarin Forms and how you can create bindable models and use them in XAML. You will learn how to handle user interactions with the device and take actions in particular events.</p> <p>With all the work done and your application ready, you will master the steps of getting the app ready and publishing it in the app store.</p>
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Xamarin Cross-Platform Development Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introduction


Xamarin.Forms is a cross-platform UI framework where the idea is no longer to share only your models, business logic, and data access layers similar to a traditional Xamarin solution but also the user interface (UI) across iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. With Xamarin.Forms, you can easily and quickly create great data-driven and utility applications or prototypes.

To accomplish this, Xamarin uses the super-modern C# language, the power of the .NET Base Class Libraries (BCL), these are C# bindings to the native APIs, and two great IDEs, Xamarin Studio and Microsoft Visual Studio. You can't, however, create iOS applications if you don't have a Mac connected to the network and acting as a server to build and deploy your application with the help of the Xamarin Build Host.

This book will provide you with real-world recipes and step-by-step development of the most common practices that you need to create professional cross-platform applications. You will learn how to create one UI across all platforms, customize the layout and views, and inject implementation per platform with a focus on patterns and best practices.

In this chapter, we will dive into the details of creating a cross-platform solution, adding a login screen, storing values for each platform, and using the Xamarin.Auth component to allow your users to log in with Facebook and Google providers. Neat! Exactly what you need to create a real-world application.