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


As a mobile developer, you create different types of applications and the majority will interact with data; they are data-driven. These apps display and manipulate data from a source, local database, filesystem, or from a remote server. From any type of persistent storage, you create classes that represent the data and in many cases transform and present them to a view. In Xamarin applications, the MVVM pattern is a common approach to design such applications. To learn more about this pattern, refer to Chapter 5, Dude, Where's my Data? and Chapter 4, Different Cars, Same Engine.

How are these data values presented to the view and also pushed back to the source (ViewModel, Model) when a value is changed? Traditionally, you might set the value to the UI control property and register to a value-changed event of the control to set the new value back to the model property. This might not sound terrifying, but when your application starts growing, maintenance and business logic changes...