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

Understanding Apple's MVC pattern


Before getting too far with iOS development, it is really important to get a foundation with Apple's design pattern for developing on iOS. You may have used the MVC (Model View Controller) pattern with other technologies such as ASP.NET, but Apple implements this paradigm in a slightly different way.

The MVC design pattern includes the following:

  • Model: This is the backend business logic that drives the application. This can be any code that, for example, makes web requests to a server or saves data to a local SQLite database.

  • View: This is the actual user interface seen on the screen. In iOS terms, this is any class that derives from UIView. Examples are toolbars, buttons, and anything else the user would see on the screen and interact with.

  • Controller: This is the workhorse of the MVC pattern. The controller interacts with the model layer and updates the view layer with the results. Just like the view layer, any controller class would derive from UIViewController...