Book Image

Xamarin Mobile Development for Android Cookbook

By : Matthew Leibowitz
Book Image

Xamarin Mobile Development for Android Cookbook

By: Matthew Leibowitz

Overview of this book

Xamarin is used by developers to write native iOS, Android, and Windows apps with native user interfaces and share code across multiple platforms not just on mobile devices, but on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Developing apps with Xamarin.Android allows you to use and re-use your code and your skills on different platforms, making you more productive in any development. Although it’s not a write-once-run-anywhere framework, Xamarin provides native platform integration and optimizations. There is no middleware; Xamarin.Android talks directly to the system, taking your C# and F# code directly to the low levels. This book will provide you with the necessary knowledge and skills to be part of the mobile development era using C#. Covering a wide range of recipes such as creating a simple application and using device features effectively, it will be your companion to the complete application development cycle. Starting with installing the necessary tools, you will be guided on everything you need to develop an application ready to be deployed. You will learn the best practices for interacting with the device hardware, such as GPS, NFC, and Bluetooth. Furthermore, you will be able to manage multimedia resources such as photos and videos captured with the device camera, and so much more! By the end of this book, you will be able to create Android apps as a result of learning and implementing pro-level practices, techniques, and solutions. This book will ascertain a seamless and successful app building experience.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Xamarin Mobile Development for Android Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Protecting the code


As Android app packages are just ZIP files that contain the assemblies and metadata, the assemblies can easily be decompiled. As a result, we need a way to make it very difficult to understand the decompiled code, or even prevent it from happening altogether.

Getting ready

In this recipe, we will make use of the Babel for .NET obfuscator (https://babelfor.net/products/obfuscator). This is a commercial product, but they do have a demo version that can be used for free. The demo version does have a few limitations, and the obfuscated apps only run for a period of time, however this does not prevent us from using it.

There aren't many Mac/Linux obfuscators for .NET, and Babel for .NET is no different. We will also need a Windows machine to use the obfuscator, but we can use the MSBuild task to integrate with the build process for Xamarin.Android. As the MSBuild task does not have any specific IDE requirements, it will work with Xamarin Studio or Visual Studio.

How to do it....