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

Using the Xamarin.UITest REPL runtime shell to test the UI


Creating your acceptance tests is challenging. Identifying the controls, structuring your commands, and replicating the desired user testing gestures is not easy, especially when you are testing a binary. Even if you are writing the source code and you have set your StyleId properties to your views, it's impossible to remember them or stop and start a test until you have the correct commands in place.

To find all the information about the controls and interact with the interface in real time, there is a command-line tool named REPL, which stands for Read-Evaluate-Print-Loop.

In this recipe, we will see how in real time you can start a test project, query the interface for the available views, interact with the views, and copy the history in the memory to start off your test method.

How to do it…

  1. Open Xamarin Studio on your Mac and go to File | New | Solution…. In the dialog that appears, choose the template in the section Cross-platform...