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

Adding localization


Creating a mobile application is an opportunity to reach out to the whole world; no barriers! This means that you will want to talk to your users' language, so you need a way to globalize your application.

Xamarin.Forms uses a built-in mechanism for localizing .NET applications. You can use RESX files, add your strings for each language code, and depending on the system language settings your application will load the appropriate value.

This is feasible in code and from XAML pages. In this recipe, we will explore the two options and present the string value Hello World! in English, and in French Bonjour le monde!.

How to do it…

  1. Start by opening Visual Studio and creating a cross-platform solution, File | New | Project…, choose Blank App (Xamarin.Forms Portable) from the templates, name it XamFormsLocalization, and click OK.

  2. Create a default RESX file and a French RESX file in the portable library, right-click and Add | New Item…, from the templates choose Resources File, name...