Xamarin Cross-Platform Development Cookbook

Xamarin Cross-Platform Development Cookbook

By : George Taskos

Buy this Book

Xamarin Cross-Platform Development Cookbook

By: George Taskos

Buy this Book

Overview of this book

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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

Xamarin Cross-Platform Development Cookbook

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewer

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

Free Chapter

One Ring to Rule Them All

Introduction

Creating a cross-platform solution

Creating a cross-platform login screen

Using common platform features

Authenticating with Facebook and Google providers

Declare Once, Visualize Everywhere

Introduction

Creating a tabbed-page cross-platform application

Adding UI behaviors and triggers

Configuring XAML with platform-specific values

Using custom renderers to change the look and feel of views

Native Platform-Specific Views and Behavior

Introduction

Showing native pages with renderers

Attaching platform-specific gestures

Taking an in-app photo with the native camera page

Different Cars, Same Engine

Introduction

Sharing code between different platforms

Using the dependency locator

Adding a third-party Dependency Injection Container

Architecture design with Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern

Using the event messenger

Adding localization

Dude, Where's my Data?

Introduction

Creating a shared SQLite data access

Performing CRUD operations in SQLite

Consuming REST web services

Leveraging native REST libraries and making efficient network calls

One for All and All for One

Introduction

Creating cross-platform plugins

Taking or choosing photos

Getting the GPS location

Show and schedule local notifications

Bind to the Data

Introduction

Binding data in code

Binding data in XAML

Configuring two-way data binding

Using value converters

A List to View

Introduction

Displaying a collection and selecting a row

Adding, removing, and refreshing items

Customizing the row template

Adding grouping and a jump index list

Gestures and Animations

Introduction

Adding gesture recognizers in XAML

Handling gestures with native platform renderers

Adding cross-platform animations

Test Your Applications, You Must

Introduction

Creating unit tests

Creating acceptance tests with Xamarin.UITest

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

Uploading and running tests in Xamarin Test Cloud

Three, Two, One – Launch and Monitor

Introduction

Using Xamarin Insights

Publishing iOS applications

Publishing Android applications

Publishing Windows Phone applications

Index

Customer Reviews

5 star

4 star

3 star

2 star

1 star

Taking an in-app photo with the native camera page

This chapter is all about mix and match cross-platform UI and native platform UI. In the last recipe of the chapter, we will create a Xamarin.Forms solution and utilize the native APIs of each platform to capture a photo.

How to do it…

As usual, create a Xamarin.Forms project in Visual Studio using a PCL class library for our core shared project. Give it the name XamFormsInAppPhoto.
Right-click our core PCL project and Add | Class…, name it InAppCameraPage, and click Add.
Make it a ContentPage subclass.
Go to the App.cs constructor and replace the code in the MainPage property assignment with a new InAppCameraPage instance.
```
MainPage = new InAppCameraPage();
```

That's all we need for our core project setup. We'll move now to the Android platform.

To get access in the related camera APIs of Android, we will need a custom PageRenderer for each platform. Right-click the Android project, Add | Class…, name the class InAppCameraPageRenderer, and click Add...

Xamarin Cross-Platform Development Cookbook

By : George Taskos

Xamarin Cross-Platform Development Cookbook

By: George Taskos

Overview of this book

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