In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

In Chapter 1, Installing and Setting Up Xamarin Studio, we walked through the somewhat lengthy process of installing Xamarin Studio and the secondary tools that you'll need for effective cross-platform mobile development. Now, we need to familiarize ourselves with the tools that are available in the IDE. Rather than simply walking through the entire interface feature by feature, it's typically easier (and far less boring) to learn the environment in the context of hands-on demonstrations. In addition, there are certain features we simply can't view outside the context of a working solution. Therefore, let's begin by creating a couple of rudimentary applications. Following this, we will fill...