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)

Summary

In this chapter, you learned how to customize DataTemplates to lay out your Views beautifully and neatly in your application's user interface by modifying your ContentPages (Views). You learned how to create and implement the various styles in your XAML pages, prior to getting accustomed to working with the PlatformEffects API to customize the appearance by creating a ButtonShadowEffect and LabelShadowEffect class for both the iOS and Android platforms, so you can style native control elements that can be rendered and used with the XAML pages for each platform. Next, you learned how to set up your margins and padding for each platform using the OnPlatform XAML attribute, before moving on to learning how to manipulate the visual appearance of data-bound fields using ValueConverters and ImageConverters.

In the next chapter, you'll work with the various animation...