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)

Registering dependencies


As mentioned earlier, each IoC and dependency injection library implements the patterns slightly differently. In this section, we will use Ninject to start adding dependency injection capabilities to our TripLog app. Ninject allows you to create Modules, which are responsible for adding services to the IoC container. The modules are then added to a Kernel that is used to resolve the services by other areas of the app.

You can create a single Ninject Module or many, depending on how your app is structured and how you want to organize your services. For the TripLog app, we will have a Ninject Module in each platform project that is responsible for registering that platform's specific service implementations. We will also create a Ninject Module in the core library that will be responsible for registering dependencies that live in the core library, such as ViewModels and data access services, which we will add later in Chapter 6, API Data Access, when we start working...