Book Image

Mastering Xamarin.Forms

By : Ed Snider
Book Image

Mastering Xamarin.Forms

By: Ed Snider

Overview of this book

Discover how to extend and build upon the components of the Xamarin.Forms toolkit to develop an effective, robust mobile app architecture. Starting with an app built with the basics of the Xamarin.Forms toolkit, we’ll go step by step through several advanced topics to create a solution architecture rich with the benefits of good design patterns and best practices. We’ll start by introducing a core separation between the app’s user interface and the app’s business logic by applying the MVVM pattern and data binding. Discover how to extend and build upon the components of the Xamarin.Forms toolkit to develop an effective, robust mobile app architecture. Starting with an app built with the basics of the Xamarin.Forms toolkit, we’ll go step by step through several advanced topics to create a solution architecture rich with the benefits of good design patterns and best practices. We’ll start by introducing a core separation between the app’s user interface and the app’s business logic by applying the MVVM pattern and data binding. Then we will focus on building out a layer of plugin-like services that handle platform-specific utilities such as navigation, geo-location, and the camera, as well as how to use these services with inversion of control and dependency injection. Next we’ll connect the app to a live web-based API and set up offline synchronization. Then, we’ll dive into testing the app—both the app logic through unit tests and the user interface using Xamarin’s UITest framework. Finally, we’ll integrate Xamarin Insights for monitoring usage and bugs to gain a proactive edge on app quality.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)

Inversion of control and dependency injection in mobile apps


In software development, IoC and dependency injection solve many problems. In the world of mobile development, specifically multi-platform mobile development, they provide a great pattern to handle platform and device-specific code. One of the most important aspects to multi-platform mobile development is the idea of sharing code. Not only does development become easier and quicker when code can be shared across apps and platforms, but also maintenance, management, feature parity, and so on. However, there are always parts of an application's codebase that simply cannot be shared due to its strict tie in with the platform's APIs. In most cases, an app's user interface represents a large portion of this non-sharable code. It is because of this that the MVVM pattern makes so much sense in multi-platform mobile development—it forces the separation of user interface code (Views) into individual platform-specific libraries, making it...