Book Image

Xamarin 4.x Cross-Platform Application Development - Third Edition

By : Jonathan Peppers
Book Image

Xamarin 4.x Cross-Platform Application Development - Third Edition

By: Jonathan Peppers

Overview of this book

Xamarin is a leading cross-platform application development tool used by top companies such as Coca-Cola, Honeywell, and Alaska Airlines to build apps. Version 4 features significant updates to the platform including the release of Xamarin.Forms 2.0 and improvements have been made to the iOS and Android designers. Xamarin was acquired by Microsoft so it is now a part of the Visual Studio family. This book will show you how to build applications for iOS, Android, and Windows. You will be walked through the process of creating an application that comes complete with a back-end web service and native features such as GPS location, camera, push notifications, and other core features. Additionally, you’ll learn how to use external libraries with Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms to create user interfaces. This book also provides instructions for Visual Studio and Windows. This edition has been updated with new screenshots and detailed steps to provide you with a holistic overview of the new features in Xamarin 4.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Xamarin 4.x Cross-Platform Application Development - Third Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Chapter 10. Third-Party Libraries

Xamarin supports a subset of the .NET framework, but for the most part includes all the standard APIs you would expect in the .NET base class libraries. Because of this, a large portion of C# open-source libraries can be used directly in Xamarin projects. Additionally, if an open source project doesn't have a Xamarin or portable class library version, porting the code to be used in a Xamarin project can often be very straightforward. Xamarin also supports calling native Objective-C and Java libraries, so we will explore these as additional means of reusing existing code.

In this chapter, we will cover the following:

  • The Xamarin Component Store

  • Porting existing C# libraries

  • Objective-C bindings

  • Java bindings