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 learned about the MVVM design pattern and how it can be used to better architect cross-platform applications. We compared several project organization strategies for managing a Xamarin Studio solution that contains both iOS and Android projects. We went over portable class libraries as the preferred option for sharing code and how to use preprocessor statements as a quick and dirty way to implement platform-specific code.

After completing this chapter, you should be able to speed up with several techniques for sharing code between iOS and Android applications using Xamarin Studio. Using the MVVM design pattern will help you divide your shared code and code that is platform specific. We also covered several options for setting up cross-platform Xamarin solutions. You should also have a firm understanding of using dependency injection and Inversion of Control to give your shared code access to the native APIs on each platform. In our next chapter, we will begin with...