Book Image

Mastering Xamarin.Forms - Second Edition

By : Ed Snider
Book Image

Mastering Xamarin.Forms - Second Edition

By: Ed Snider

Overview of this book

Discover how to extend and build upon the components of the Xamarin.Forms toolkit to develop effective, robust mobile app architecture. Starting with an app built with the basics of the Xamarin.Forms toolkit, we'll go step by step through several advanced topics to create a solution architecture rich with the benefits of good design patterns and best practices. We'll start by introducing a core separation between the app's user interface and the app's business logic by applying the MVVM pattern and data-binding. Then we will focus on building out a layer of plugin-like services that handle platform-specific utilities such as navigation and geo-location, as well as how to loosely use these services in the app with inversion of control and dependency injection. Next we'll connect the app to a live web-based API and set up offline synchronization. Then, we'll dive into testing the app logic through unit tests. Finally, we will setup Visual Studio App Center to automate building, testing, distributing and monitoring the app.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Xamarin.Forms DependencyService versus third-party alternatives

In addition to providing the core building blocks for the MVVM pattern, Xamarin.Forms also includes a very basic service that handles dependency registration and resolution, called the DependencyService. We actually used this service in the previous chapter to register and resolve our custom navigation service. Like many of the services and components built into the Xamarin.Forms toolkit, DependencyService is designed to help get developers up and running quickly by providing an easy-to-use basic implementation. It is in no way the only way of handling dependencies in a Xamarin.Forms mobile app and, in most complex apps, you will quickly outgrow the capabilities of the Xamarin.Forms DependencyService. For example, the Xamarin.Forms DependencyService doesn't provide a way of doing constructor injection.

There...