Since Xamarin made its appearance several years ago, developers have been delighted with being able to create native mobile applications that can target different OS platforms, as well as having the option of developing apps using either the C# or F# programming languages, enabling developers to distribute their app ideas to either the iOS, Android, or Windows platforms.
As you progress through this book, you'll learn how to apply best practices and design principles when developing cross-platform mobile applications using the Xamarin.Forms platform, to allow developers to build cross-platform user interface layouts that can be shared across the Android, iOS, and Windows mobile platforms.
Since each of these apps can be written using a single programming language, it makes sense to write a single codebase that would compile and build into separate apps for each of these different platforms.
This chapter will begin by showing you how to download and install the Visual Studio for Mac IDE, as well as the Xamarin components for both the iOS and Android platforms. You'll explore some of the features contained in the Visual Studio for Mac IDE and then gain an understanding of the Xamarin mobile platform.
You'll learn how to create your very first cross-platform Xamarin.Forms application for both the iOS and Android platforms, create the user interface using XAML, and create some C# code that will communicate with the XAML code.
To end this chapter, you'll learn how to set Breakpoints and define conditional Breakpoints in your code to pause execution, before moving on to learning how to use the built-in debugging tools to debug your application and launch it in the iOS simulator.
This chapter will cover the following points:
- Downloading and installing the Visual Studio for Mac IDE and the Xamarin Platform SDKs
- Exploring the Visual Studio for Mac IDE
- Understanding the Xamarin mobile platform
- Creating a new Xamarin.Forms project for both iOS and Android
- Setting Breakpoints and defining conditional Breakpoints in your code
- Using the Visual Studio for Mac built-in debugger
