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

Objective-C bindings


Xamarin has developed a sophisticated system for calling native Objective-C libraries from C# in iOS projects. The core of Xamarin.iOS uses this same technology to call native Apple APIs in UIKit, CoreGraphics, and other iOS frameworks. Developers can create iOS binding projects to expose Objective-C classes and methods to C# using simple interfaces and attributes.

To aid in creating Objective-C bindings, Xamarin has created a small tool named Objective Sharpie that can process Objective-C header files for you and export the valid C# definitions to add to a binding project. This tool is a great starting point for most bindings and will get about 75% of your binding project working in most cases. You will want to hand-edit and fine-tune things to be more C#-friendly most of the time.

Tip

Note that iOS binding projects can be created in Visual Studio; however, Objective Sharpie is a command-line tool for OS X. It leverages tooling included with Xcode, so iOS binding development...