Book Image

Xamarin 4.x Cross-Platform Application Development - Third Edition

By : Jonathan Peppers
Book Image

Xamarin 4.x Cross-Platform Application Development - Third Edition

By: Jonathan Peppers

Overview of this book

Xamarin is a leading cross-platform application development tool used by top companies such as Coca-Cola, Honeywell, and Alaska Airlines to build apps. Version 4 features significant updates to the platform including the release of Xamarin.Forms 2.0 and improvements have been made to the iOS and Android designers. Xamarin was acquired by Microsoft so it is now a part of the Visual Studio family. This book will show you how to build applications for iOS, Android, and Windows. You will be walked through the process of creating an application that comes complete with a back-end web service and native features such as GPS location, camera, push notifications, and other core features. Additionally, you’ll learn how to use external libraries with Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms to create user interfaces. This book also provides instructions for Visual Studio and Windows. This edition has been updated with new screenshots and detailed steps to provide you with a holistic overview of the new features in Xamarin 4.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Xamarin 4.x Cross-Platform Application Development - Third Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Porting existing C# libraries


Even though Xamarin is becoming a popular platform, many open-source .NET libraries are simply not up to speed with supporting Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android. But in these cases, you are definitely not out of luck. Often, if there is a Silverlight or Windows Phone version of the library, you can simply create an iOS or Android class library and add the files with no code changes.

To illustrate this process, let's port an open source project that doesn't have Xamarin or portable class library support. I have selected a dependency injection library called Ninject, due to its usefulness and relationship to ninjas. Find out more about the library at http://www.ninject.org/.

Let's begin setting up the library to work with Xamarin projects as follows:

  1. First, download the source code for Ninject from https://github.com/ninject/ninject.

  2. Create a new solution with an iOS Class Library project named Ninject.iOS.

  3. Link in all the files from the Ninject main project. Make sure...