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>

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Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Mastering Xamarin UI Development
Mastering Xamarin UI Development
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Customer Feedback
Dedication
Dedication
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Creating the TrackMyWalks Native App
Creating the TrackMyWalks Native App
Creating the TrackMyWalks solution
Creating the TrackMyWalks model
Creating the walks main page
Creating the new walk entry content page
Creating the walk trail content page
Creating the DistanceTravelledPage content page
Creating the Splash screen content page
Differences between Xamarin Studio and Visual Studio
Running the TrackMyWalks app using the simulator
Summary
2
MVVM and Data Binding
MVVM and Data Binding
Understanding the MVVM pattern architecture
Implementing the MVVM ViewModels within your app
Creating the WalkBaseViewModel for the TrackMyWalks app
Implementing the WalksPageViewModel
Implementing the walks entry page ViewModel
Implementing the walk trail page ViewModel
Implementing the DistanceTravelledViewModel
Summary
3
Navigating within the MVVM Model - The Xamarin.Forms Way
Navigating within the MVVM Model - The Xamarin.Forms Way
Understanding the Xamarin.Forms Navigation API
Differences between the navigation and ViewModel approaches
Implementing the navigation service within your app
Summary
4
Adding Location-Based Features within Your App
Adding Location-Based Features within Your App
Creating and using platform-specific services
Summary
5
Customizing the User Interface
Customizing the User Interface
Creating the DataTemplate class for the TrackMyWalks app
Creating a TableView EntryCell custom picker for the iOS platform
Creating the custom picker renderer class for the iOS platform
Creating PlatformEffects using the Effects API for the iOS platform
Creating PlatformEffects using the Effects API for the Android platform
Implementing value converters within the TrackMyWalks app
Summary
6
Working with Razor Templates
Working with Razor Templates
Understanding the Razor template engine
Creating and implementing Razor templates within Xamarin Studio
Creating and implementing the book library database model
Creating and implementing the book database wrapper
Creating and implementing the BookLibrary database wrapper
Creating and implementing the book listing main page
Creating and implementing the BookLibraryAdd Razor template
Creating and implementing the BookLibraryEdit Razor template
Creating and implementing the WebViewController class
Summary
7
Incorporating API Data Access Using Microsoft Azure App Services
Incorporating API Data Access Using Microsoft Azure App Services
Setting up our TrackMyWalks app using Microsoft Azure
Creating the HTTP web service class for the TrackMyWalks app
Creating the DataService API for the TrackMyWalks app
Creating the DataService API class for the TrackMyWalks app
Summary
8
Making Our App Social - Using the Facebook API
Making Our App Social - Using the Facebook API
Setting up and registering the TrackMyWalks app with Facebook
Creating a Facebook user model for the TrackMyWalks app
Updating the NavigationService Interface for the TrackMyWalks app
Updating the WalksPage to properly handle Facebook Sign In
Summary
9
Unit Testing Your Xamarin.Forms Apps Using the NUnit and UITest Frameworks
Unit Testing Your Xamarin.Forms Apps Using the NUnit and UITest Frameworks
Creating a unit test solution folder using Xamarin Studio
Creating a unit test project using Xamarin Studio
Creating a UI test project using Xamarin Studio
Understanding the commonly used UITest methods
Adding the Xamarin Test Cloud Agent to the iOS project
Running the TrackMyWalks UITests using Xamarin Studio
Summary
10
Packaging and Deploying Your Xamarin.Forms Applications
Packaging and Deploying Your Xamarin.Forms Applications
Creating and setting up your iOS development team
Creating the TrackMyWalks iOS development certificate
Creating the TrackMyWalks development provisioning profile
Preparing the TrackMyWalks (iOS) app for submission
Summary

Implementing value converters within the TrackMyWalks app

As mentioned in the previous section, value converters form an important concept in data binding as they allow you to customize the appearance of a data property at the time it is bound. This process is quite similar to WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) on the Windows application development platform. Xamarin.Forms provides you with a number of value converter interfaces as part of its API.

Value converters are extremely helpful when working with the Xamarin.Forms platform, as they allow you to toggle the visibility of elements, based on a Boolean property.

In this section, we will create a BooleanConverter that we will use to hide controls until the ViewModel has completely finished loading. We will also create a converter that converts a string value into a URL property that will be used to display an image for our difficulty rating.

Let's take a look at how we can achieve this, by following the steps:

  1. Create a new folder, within...

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