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)

Creating an API with Microsoft Azure App Services


Almost all mobile apps communicate with an API to retrieve and store information. In many cases, as a mobile app developer, you might just have to simply consume an API that already exists. However, if you're building your own service, as opposed to consuming someone else's, you will need to create your own API. There are several ways you can create an API, several places you can host it, and certainly many different languages you can develop it in. For the purposes of this book, we are going to create an API in the cloud using Microsoft Azure App Services. Azure App Services contains many products and features, one of which is called Mobile Apps (formally known as Azure Mobile Services).

Azure Mobile Apps provide a very quick and easy way to get a fully functional backend service up and running in a matter of minutes. You can create the backend service using either Node.js or .NET. Because the primary focus of this book is developing a mobile...