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

Summary


In this chapter, we learned about the MVVM design pattern and how it can be used to better architect cross-platform applications. We compared several project organization strategies for managing a Xamarin Studio solution containing both iOS and Android projects. We went over portable class libraries as the preferred option for sharing code and how to use preprocessor statements as a quick and dirty way to implement platform-specific code.

After completing this chapter, you should be up to speed with several techniques for sharing code between iOS and Android applications using Xamarin Studio. Using the MVVM design pattern will help you separate your shared code and code that is platform specific. We also covered several options for setting up cross-platform Xamarin solutions. You should also have a firm understanding of using the dependency injection and Inversion of Control to give your shared code access to the native APIs on each platform. In our next chapter, we will begin with...