In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
Requirements for using Xamarin.Forms
The Xamarin.Forms project templates
The Xamarin.Forms components
The API design
The XAML design
In addition to the new iOS designer, Xamarin 3 introduces another powerful toolset to Xamarin Studio: the Xamarin.Forms framework. Xamarin.Forms is a UI toolkit abstraction that allows developers to rapidly create user interfaces that will run natively on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone devices all from within the same solution.
This works because the Xamarin.Forms toolkit is a wrapper that sits on top of the native UI elements from each platform. At compile time, the UI elements you create in these projects are converted to their native counterparts. This means that your application will retain the look and feel of a native application across all three platforms.
This chapter will briefly introduce the project templates available in the Xamarin.Forms framework, and you will...