Book Image

Xamarin Cross-platform Application Development

By : Jonathan Peppers
Book Image

Xamarin Cross-platform Application Development

By: Jonathan Peppers

Overview of this book

<p>Developing a mobile application for just one platform is becoming a thing of the past. Companies expect their apps to be supported on both iOS and Android, whilst leveraging the best native features of both. Xamarin’s tools help solve this requirement by giving developers a single toolset to target both platforms.</p> <p>"Xamarin Cross-platform Application Development" is a step-by-step guide for building professional applications for iOS and Android. The book walks you through building a chat application, complete with a backend web service and native features such as GPS location, camera, and push notifications.</p> <p>This book begins with iOS and Android application fundamentals, then moves on to sharing code, and eventually digs deeper into native functionality. By the end of the book, readers will have successfully built a cross-platform application ready for submitting to app stores. You will gain an in-depth knowledge about the concepts of building cross platform applications.</p> <p>"Xamarin Cross-platform Application Development" also covers native iOS and Android APIs, unit testing, building a real web service with Windows Azure, push notifications, interacting with the camera and GPS, leveraging Java and Objective-C libraries, and finally app store submission. Towards the end of the book you will feel confident in developing your own Xamarin applications.</p> <p>"Xamarin Cross-platform Application Development" will teach you everything you need to know to develop an end-to-end, cross-platform solution with Xamarin.</p>
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Xamarin Cross-platform Application Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Summary


In this chapter, we discussed Xamarin's core products for developing Android and iOS applications in C#: Xamarin Studio, Xamarin.iOS, and Xamarin.Android. We installed Xcode and then ran the Xamarin all-in-one installer, which installs Java, the Android SDK, Xamarin Studio, Xamarin.iOS, and Xamarin.Android. We set up the x86 Android Emulator for a faster, more fluid experience when debugging applications. Finally we set up iOS and Google Play developer accounts for distributing our applications.

In this chapter, you should have acquired everything you need to get started on building cross-platform applications with Xamarin. Your development computer should be ready to go and you should have all the native SDKs installed and ready for creating the next great app to take the world by storm.

The concepts in this chapter will set us up for more advanced topics that will require the proper software installed as well as developer accounts with Apple and Google. We will be deploying applications to real devices and implementing more advanced features such as push notifications. In the next chapter, we'll create our first iOS and Android application and cover the basics of each platform.