Book Image

Mastering Xamarin UI Development

By : Steven F. Daniel
Book Image

Mastering Xamarin UI Development

By: Steven F. Daniel

Overview of this book

<p>Xamarin is the most powerful cross-platform mobile development framework. If you are interested in creating stunning user interfaces for the iOS and Android mobile platforms using the power of Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms, then this is your ticket.</p> <p>This book will provide you the practical skills required to develop real-world Xamarin applications. You will learn how to implement UI structures and layouts, create customized elements, and write C# scripts to customize layouts. You will create UI layouts from scratch so that you can tweak and customize a given UI layout to suit your needs by using Data Templates.</p> <p>Moving on, you will use third-party libraries – such as the Razor template engine that allows you to create your own HTML5 templates within the Xamarin environment – to build a book library Hybrid solution that uses the SQLite.Net library to store, update, retrieve, and delete information within a SQLite local database. You’ll also implement key data-binding techniques that will make your user interfaces dynamic, and create personalized animations and visual effects within your user interfaces using Custom Renderers and the PlatformEffects API to customize and change the appearance of control elements.</p> <p>At the end of this book, you will test your application UI for robust and consistent behavior and then explore techniques to deploy to different platforms.</p>
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Mastering Xamarin UI Development
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Dedication
Preface

Differences between Xamarin Studio and Visual Studio


When developing cross-platform mobile apps, you currently have a choice of using either Xamarin Studio or Microsoft's Visual Studio development environments. It is worth noting that, although the screenshots and example code used throughout this book have been developed using Xamarin Studio running on an Apple Macintosh computer, the code should compile fine on a Windows machine running Microsoft Visual Studio 2015.

However, there are some differences that you need to be aware of before embarking on the journey of building your mobile development solutions. If you are running Xamarin Studio on a Windows machine, you will get an Android project solution whenever you create a new Xamarin.Forms solution.

If you want to integrate and develop apps for Windows Phone, you will need to ensure that you are running Microsoft Visual Studio on a Windows machine. When developing apps for iOS applications, you will need to prepare your Mac to be the Xamarin build host by firstly enabling Remote Login on your Mac within the System Preferences section, and then selecting the Mac to be the build host from within the Microsoft Visual Studio environment on your Windows machine.

Note

For more information on how to prepare your Mac to be the Xamarin build host, refer to the Xamarin developer documentation at https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/ios/getting_started/installation/windows/connecting-to-mac/.

Now that you have an understanding of the differences between Xamarin Studio and Microsoft Visual Studio, our next step is to compile, build and run the TrackMyWalks application within the iOS simulator.