Book Image

Mastering Xamarin UI Development - Second Edition

By : Steven F. Daniel
Book Image

Mastering Xamarin UI Development - Second Edition

By: Steven F. Daniel

Overview of this book

This book will provide you with the knowledge and practical skills that are required to develop real-world Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms applications. You’ll learn how to create native Android app that will interact with the device camera and photo gallery, and then create a native iOS sliding tiles game. You will learn how to implement complex UI layouts and create customizable control elements based on the platform, using XAML and C# 7 code to interact with control elements within your XAML ContentPages. You’ll learn how to add location-based features by to your apps by creating a LocationService class and using the Xam.Plugin.Geolocator cross-platform library, that will be used to obtain the current device location. Next, you’ll learn how to work with and implement animations and visual effects within your UI using the PlatformEffects API, using C# code. At the end of this book, you’ll learn how to integrate Microsoft Azure App Services and use the Twitter APIs within your app. You will work with the Razor Templating Engine to build a book library HTML5 solution that will use a SQLite.net library to store, update, retrieve, and delete information within a local SQLite database. Finally, you will learn how to write unit tests using the NUnit and UITest frameworks.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Creating and implementing our data model

In this section, we will take a look at how to create the data model that will be used to define information that's related to our trail entries. The advantage of creating a data model is that it is much easier to add additional properties to this model, and then implement these in the relevant class files.

Another advantage of using a data model is that you can bind this model to a database or bind this to data that's stored within a Microsoft Azure database. As we progress through this chapter, you'll see how you can use this model to set up and initialize walk entries for our TrackMyWalks page using a ListView control to display trail information for each row contained within the ListView.

Let's start by creating the WalkDataModel class for our TrackMyWalks app by performing the following steps:

  1. Ensure that the TrackMyWalks...