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)

Offline data caching

Mobile apps have several benefits over web apps, one of which is the ability to operate offline and maintain offline data. There are a couple of reasons why offline data is important to a mobile app. First of all, you cannot guarantee that your app will always have a network connection and the ability to directly connect to live data. Supporting offline data allows users to use the app, even if only for limited use cases when they are operating with limited or no connectivity. Secondly, users expect mobile apps to offer high performance, specifically, quick access to data without having to wait. By maintaining an offline cache, an app can present a user with data immediately while it's busy retrieving a fresh dataset, providing a perceived level of performance to the user. It is important that when the cache updates, the user receives that updated data...