Book Image

Xamarin Cross-platform Application Development

By : Jonathan Peppers
Book Image

Xamarin Cross-platform Application Development

By: Jonathan Peppers

Overview of this book

<p>Developing a mobile application for just one platform is becoming a thing of the past. Companies expect their apps to be supported on both iOS and Android, whilst leveraging the best native features of both. Xamarin’s tools help solve this requirement by giving developers a single toolset to target both platforms.</p> <p>"Xamarin Cross-platform Application Development" is a step-by-step guide for building professional applications for iOS and Android. The book walks you through building a chat application, complete with a backend web service and native features such as GPS location, camera, and push notifications.</p> <p>This book begins with iOS and Android application fundamentals, then moves on to sharing code, and eventually digs deeper into native functionality. By the end of the book, readers will have successfully built a cross-platform application ready for submitting to app stores. You will gain an in-depth knowledge about the concepts of building cross platform applications.</p> <p>"Xamarin Cross-platform Application Development" also covers native iOS and Android APIs, unit testing, building a real web service with Windows Azure, push notifications, interacting with the camera and GPS, leveraging Java and Objective-C libraries, and finally app store submission. Towards the end of the book you will feel confident in developing your own Xamarin applications.</p> <p>"Xamarin Cross-platform Application Development" will teach you everything you need to know to develop an end-to-end, cross-platform solution with Xamarin.</p>
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Xamarin Cross-platform Application Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introducing Xamarin.Mobile


To simplify the development of these features across multiple platforms, Xamarin has developed a library called Xamarin.Mobile. It delivers a single API for accessing the contacts, GPS location, cardinal direction, camera, and photo library for iOS, Android, and even Windows platforms. It also takes advantage of Task Parallel Libraries (TPL) to deliver a modern C# API that will make developers more productive than what their native alternatives would. This gives you the ability to write nice, clean, asynchronous code using the async and await keywords in C#. You can also reuse the same code in iOS and Android, minus a few differences that are required by the Android platform.

To install Xamarin.Mobile, open the Xamarin Component Store in Xamarin Studio and add the Xamarin.Mobile component to a project, as shown in the following screenshot; you're going to be using these features (of the component):

Before we dig further into using Xamarin.Mobile, let's review the...