Book Image

Xamarin Cross-platform Application Development - Second Edition

By : Jonathan Peppers
Book Image

Xamarin Cross-platform Application Development - Second Edition

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, while leveraging the best native features on both. Xamarin's tools help ease this problem by giving developers a single toolset to target both platforms.</p> <p>This book is a step-by-step guide to building real-world 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. Additionally, you'll learn how to use external libraries with Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms to create shared user interfaces and make app-store-ready applications. This second edition has been updated with new screenshots and detailed steps to provide you with a holistic overview of the new features incorporated in Xamarin 3. By the end of the book, you will have gained expertise to build on the concepts learned and effectively develop a market-ready cross-platform application.</p>
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Xamarin Cross-platform Application Development Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Using the iOS designer


Since our plain white application is quite boring, let's modify the View layer of our application with some controls. To do this, we will modify the MainStoryboard.storyboard file in your project in Xamarin Studio. Optionally, you can open the storyboard file in Xcode, which was previously the method of editing storyboard files before the designer was available in Xamarin Studio. Using Xcode can still be useful if there is a feature in iOS storyboards that isn't available yet in the Xamarin designer or if you need to edit an older iOS format such as XIB files. However, Xcode is not quite as good of an experience, since custom controls in Xcode render as a plain white square. Xamarin's designer actually runs your drawing code in custom controls, so that you get an accurate view of what your application will look like at runtime.

Let's add some controls to our app by performing the following steps:

  1. Open the project you created earlier in this chapter in Xamarin Studio...