Book Image

Xamarin Mobile Development for Android Cookbook

By : Matthew Leibowitz
Book Image

Xamarin Mobile Development for Android Cookbook

By: Matthew Leibowitz

Overview of this book

Xamarin is used by developers to write native iOS, Android, and Windows apps with native user interfaces and share code across multiple platforms not just on mobile devices, but on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Developing apps with Xamarin.Android allows you to use and re-use your code and your skills on different platforms, making you more productive in any development. Although it’s not a write-once-run-anywhere framework, Xamarin provides native platform integration and optimizations. There is no middleware; Xamarin.Android talks directly to the system, taking your C# and F# code directly to the low levels. This book will provide you with the necessary knowledge and skills to be part of the mobile development era using C#. Covering a wide range of recipes such as creating a simple application and using device features effectively, it will be your companion to the complete application development cycle. Starting with installing the necessary tools, you will be guided on everything you need to develop an application ready to be deployed. You will learn the best practices for interacting with the device hardware, such as GPS, NFC, and Bluetooth. Furthermore, you will be able to manage multimedia resources such as photos and videos captured with the device camera, and so much more! By the end of this book, you will be able to create Android apps as a result of learning and implementing pro-level practices, techniques, and solutions. This book will ascertain a seamless and successful app building experience.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Xamarin Mobile Development for Android Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introduction


No app is developed or run in a vacuum. All users will have multiple apps installed on their devices, and we can take advantage of that to make our apps great.

If our app is an encyclopedia for a specific topic, we may want to share something. We can create mini Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ activities to interact with these social networks. We can create mini e-mail and SMS sections to support sharing in those formats. Alternatively, we can just use the user's favorite app that is installed on their device.

Using other apps that the user has installed on their device allows us to write smaller and more specific apps. We can then focus on our app and let the other developers improve their apps. This leads to a generally better app ecosystem. Also, if we use the app that the user prefers, we make our app friendlier to that user.

We may want our app to respond to system events and then change the way we work. For example, if the device loses connectivity, we can pause downloads...