Book Image

Xamarin.Forms Projects

By : Johan Karlsson, Daniel Hindrikes
Book Image

Xamarin.Forms Projects

By: Johan Karlsson, Daniel Hindrikes

Overview of this book

Xamarin.Forms is a lightweight cross-platform development toolkit for building applications with a rich user interface. In this book you'll start by building projects that explain the Xamarin.Forms ecosystem to get up and running with building cross-platform applications. We'll increase in difficulty throughout the projects, making you learn the nitty-gritty of Xamarin.Forms offerings. You'll gain insights into the architecture, how to arrange your app's design, where to begin developing, what pitfalls exist, and how to avoid them. The book contains seven real-world projects, to get you hands-on with building rich UIs and providing a truly cross-platform experience. It will also guide you on how to set up a machine for Xamarin app development. You'll build a simple to-do application that gets you going, then dive deep into building advanced apps such as messaging platform, games, and machine learning, to build a UI for an augmented reality project. By the end of the book, you'll be confident in building cross-platforms and fitting Xamarin.Forms toolkits in your app development. You'll be able to take the practice you get from this book to build applications that comply with your requirements.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Introduction to Xamarin

This chapter is all about getting to know what Xamarin is and what to expect from it. It is the only chapter that is a pure theory chapter; all the others will cover hands-on projects. You're not expected to write any code at this point, but instead, simply read through the chapter to develop a high-level understanding of what Xamarin is and how Xamarin.Forms are related to Xamarin.

We will start by defining what a native application is and what .NET as a technology brings to the table. After that, we will look at how Xamarin.Forms fit into the bigger picture and

learn when it is appropriate to use traditional Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms. We often use the term traditional Xamarin to describe applications that don't use Xamarin.Forms, even though Xamarin.Forms applications are bootstrapped through a traditional Xamarin application.

In this chapter, we will be covering the following topics:

  • Native applications
  • Xamarin and Mono
  • Xamarin.Forms
  • Setting up a development machine

Let's get started!