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

Working with portable class libraries


A portable class library (PCL) is a C# library project that is able to be supported on multiple platforms including iOS, Android, Windows, Windows Store apps, Windows phone, Silverlight, and Xbox 360. PCLs have been an effort by Microsoft to simplify development across different versions of the .NET framework. Xamarin has also added support on iOS and Android for PCLs. Many popular cross-platform frameworks and open source libraries are starting to develop PCL versions such as Json.NET and MVVMCross.

To set up a shared project, perform the following steps:

  1. Open Xamarin Studio and start a new solution.

  2. Select a new Single View App under the Multiplatform | App section. Or in Visual Studio, Cross-platform | Blank App (Native Portable).

  3. Name the app ProductSearch, and select Use Portable Library.

  4. Complete this new project wizard and Xamarin Studio will generate three projects: ProductSearch, ProductSearch.Droid, and ProductSearch.iOS.

  5. Add the Product, ProductRepository...