Chapter 1, One Ring to Rule Them All, shows you how to work with Xamarin Forms, how to get started with a simple project, understand the structure, and make use of available controls. Starting out the first chapter with creating a cross-platform solution using Xamarin Studio and Visual Studio, create your first first page, use Xamarin's out-of-the-box common platform APIs, and learn how to access the native platform page renderers.

Chapter 2, Declare Once, Visualize Everywhere, shows you how to use the Xamarin Forms XAML declarative language to create cross-platform UI. This chapter introduces you to how to create a tabbed application and add UI behaviors and triggers; the main focus is user interface development and providing knowledge in view renderers.

Chapter 3, Native Platform-Specific Views and Behavior, teaches you how to create different page layouts and custom controls per platform. Cross-platform development has all the benefits of sharing code across all three platforms, though there are many scenarios in which you need to access the native platform layer. This chapter will give you all the recipes to create custom platform views, add platform-specific gestures, and access the camera platform APIs.

Chapter 4, Different Cars, Same Engine, shows you how to apply cross-platform architecture, patterns, and practices. Leverage the power of Xamarin.Forms with six sections with all the ins and outs of best practices for sharing code between platform. Use the built-in dependency locator to resolve implementation classes and publish messages to components. Design an MVVM solution, add a third-party DI container for Aspect Oriented Programming and localize your applications for any languages.

Chapter 5, Dude, Where's my Data?, shows you how to create a cross-platform data access component fetching data from a local SQLite database and a REST web service. Separation of concerns in a cross-platform solution is critical, learn how to create efficient web and local database repositories. Leverage the native platform performant HTTP SDKs adding and configuring a NuGet package.

Chapter 6, One for All and All for One, shows you how to use Xamarin plugins to access native platform capabilities like the camera, GPS, and showing local notifications. The Xamarin community is very generous, there are plugins for Xamarin almost for anything you might want or learn how to do it adding your own implementation, and then share it with giving back or maybe as a commercial library. Learn how to create your own cross-platform plugins and how to use plugins for photos, GPS and local notifications.

Chapter 7, Bind to the Data, shows you how to leverage the built-in Xamarin Forms data-binding mechanism. Databinding is not a concept that every native platform is providing out of the box, and if you can't actually use data-binding the MVVM architecture doesn't sound such a great idea. Xamarin.Forms provides an out of the box mechanism to bind your data in code or declarative XAML.

Chapter 8, A List to View, teaches you how to bind collections to ListView, customize its appearance with custom cells and apply grouping.

Chapter 9, Gestures and Animations, shows you how to add cross-platform animations shared between iOS, Android, and Windows Phone and handle user gestures in XAML and in native platform renderers.

Chapter 10, Test Your Applications, You Must, shows you how to create unit tests for your portable shared code, and platform-specific unit tests. Create UI acceptance tests and run them locally or in Xamarin Test Cloud. Learn how to use Calabash and REPL.

Chapter 11, Three, Two, One – Launch and Monitor, shows you how to add real-time monitoring to get detailed error reports. Prepare and package your applications for submission in iOS, Android, and Windows Phone stores.

All examples will work with the Free Trial evaluation or Xamarin Starter licenses. Xamarin Starter is installed by default with Visual Studio 2015 and works with VS 2012, 2013, and 2015 (including Community editions).

This book is for mobile developers. You must have some basic experience of C# programming, but no previous experience with Xamarin is required. If you are just starting with C# and want to use Xamarin to develop cross-platform apps effectively and efficiently, then this book is the right choice for you.

In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it…, How it works…, There's more…, and See also).

To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, we use these sections as follows:

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "With the Auth.GetUI() method, we get a platform-specific object that we can use to show our authentication view."

A block of code is set as follows:

Position position = new Position(40.730599, -73.986581);
Pin pin = new Pin {
  Type = PinType.Place,
  Position = position,
  Label = "New York",
  Address = "New York"
};

map.Pins.Add(pin);

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

[0:] Exception: System.NotSupportedException: Need to fix this!
  at XamFormsMessagingCenter.MainPage.OnAppearing ()………..

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: " Start Visual Studio and create a new Blank App (Xamarin.Forms Portable) project."

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