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 Android Manifest


All Android applications the have an XML file called the Android Manifest, which declares basic information about the app, and is named AndroidManifest.xml. This is very similar to the Info.plist file on iOS, but Android puts much more emphasis on its importance. A default project doesn't have a manifest, so begin creating one by going to Project Options | Android Application and clicking on Add Android Manifest. Several new settings for your application will appear.

The most important settings are as follows:

  • Application name: This is the title of your application, which is displayed below the icon. It is not the same as the name selected on Google Play.

  • Package name: This is just like on iOS; it's your app's bundle identifier or bundle ID. It is a unique name to identify your application. The convention is to use the reverse domain style with your company name at the beginning, for example, com.packt.xamchat. It must begin with a lower case letter and contain...