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)

Unit testing


We will start by testing the business logic in the TripLog app. We will do this by creating a new unit test project in our solution that will be responsible for testing our ViewModels.

There are many options and libraries to create unit tests in .NET. By default, Xamarin Studio leverages the popular NUnit framework for performing unit tests.

In order to create a unit test project, perform the following steps:

  1. Create a new solution folder named Tests. While this is not required, it helps keep any testing-related projects organized within the overall solution. To add a new solution folder in Xamarin Studio, simply right click on the solution, go to Add and click on Add Solution Folder, as seen in Figure 1:

    Figure 1 Creating a new solution folder for testing related projects

  2. Next, create a new NUnit project in the new Tests solution folder and name it TripLog.Tests.

By default, the new NUnit project will contain a file named Test.cs. You can safely delete this file, as we will create...