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

Creating a UI test project using Xamarin Studio


In the previous section, we saw how easy it is to create a set of unit tests that enable us to test our ViewModels within the TrackMyWalks project. Whilst unit testing ensures that a significant amount of code is tested, it is primarily focused on testing the actual business logic within the app. This leaves the user interface portions of the app still untested, but the beauty of using UI testing allows us to automate specific actions within our app's user interface to ensure that it is working as expected.

Fortunately, Xamarin Studio provides you with a rich set of tools for performing automated UI tests, and these can be both written in C# and make use of the UITest framework. Let's start by creating a new UITest project within our TrackMyWalks.Tests project solution, by performing the following steps:

  1. Right-click on the TrackMyWalks.Tests solution project and choose the Add | Add New Project... menu option. If you can't remember how to do...