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

Using the iOS designer


Since our plain white application is quite boring, let's modify the view layer of our application with some controls. To do this, we will modify the MainStoryboard.storyboard file in your project in Xamarin Studio or Visual Studio. Optionally, you can open the storyboard file in Xcode, which was previously the method of editing storyboard files before the Xamarin.iOS designer. Using Xcode could still be useful if there is a feature in iOS storyboards which isn't available in the Xamarin designer, or if you need to edit an older iOS format such as XIB files. However, Xcode is not quite as good of an experience, since custom controls in Xcode render as plain, white squares. Xamarin's designer actually runs your drawing code in custom controls, so that you get an accurate view of what your application will look like at runtime.

Let's add some controls to our app by performing the following steps:

  1. Open the project you created earlier in this chapter in Xamarin Studio.

  2. Double...