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 2. Hello, Platforms!

If you are familiar with developing applications using Visual Studio on Windows, then using Xamarin Studio should be very straightforward. Xamarin uses the same concept of a solution containing one or more projects, and it has created several new project types for iOS and Android applications. There are also several project templates to jump-start your development of common applications.

Xamarin Studio supports several out-of-the-box project types, including standard .NET class libraries and console applications. You cannot natively develop Windows applications on a Mac with Xamarin Studio, but you can certainly develop the shared code portion of your application in Xamarin Studio. We'll focus on sharing code in the later chapters, but keep in mind that Xamarin enables you to share a common C# backend between most platforms that support C#.

In this chapter, we will cover:

  • Creating a simple calculator application for iOS

  • Apple's MVC pattern

  • Xcode and storyboards

  • Creating...