Book Image

Xamarin Cross-platform Application Development - Second Edition

By : Jonathan Peppers
Book Image

Xamarin Cross-platform Application Development - Second Edition

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, while leveraging the best native features on both. Xamarin's tools help ease this problem by giving developers a single toolset to target both platforms.</p> <p>This book is a step-by-step guide to building real-world 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. Additionally, you'll learn how to use external libraries with Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms to create shared user interfaces and make app-store-ready applications. This second edition has been updated with new screenshots and detailed steps to provide you with a holistic overview of the new features incorporated in Xamarin 3. By the end of the book, you will have gained expertise to build on the concepts learned and effectively develop a market-ready cross-platform application.</p>
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Xamarin Cross-platform Application Development Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Summary


In this chapter, we covered the basics of Xamarin.Forms and learned how it can be very useful to build your own cross-platform applications. Xamarin.Forms shines for certain types of apps, but can be limiting if you need to write more complicated UIs or take advantage of native drawing APIs. We discovered how to use XAML to declare our Xamarin.Forms UIs and understood how Xamarin.Forms controls are rendered on each platform. We also dived into the concepts of data binding and discovered how to use the MVVM design pattern with Xamarin.Forms. Last but not least, we began porting the XamChat application that was discussed earlier in the book to Xamarin.Forms and we were able to reuse most of the backend code.