Chapter 1, The Anatomy of an Android App, provides an overview of the Android platform and what Android apps are composed of.

Chapter 2, The Xamarin.Android Architecture, provides an overview of the Xamarin platforms and describes how the Mono and Android runtime work together in order to allow developers to build Android apps using C#.

Chapter 3, Creating the Points of Interest App, walks you through how to set up the development environment, create a new Xamarin.Android app, and run the app in the Android emulator.

Chapter 4, Adding a List View, describes Android's AdapterView architecture and walks you through how to use ListView and create a custom adapter. This chapter also covers how to download the data asynchronously from a web service and display the response on a custom ListView.

Chapter 5, Adding a Details View, walks you through how to create a details view to display the details of POIApp, add navigation from ListView, and add actions to perform the save and delete web service operations.

Chapter 6, Making Your App Orientation-aware, walks you through how to detect the device orientation and handle application behaviors on the configuration changes.

Chapter 7, Designing for Multiple Screen Sizes, introduces you to the Android fragments and the different techniques used for managing the resources and layout to support multiple screen sizes, including Android tablets.

Chapter 8, Creating Data Storage Mechanisms, discusses a number of available data storage options in Xamarin.Android and stores the Point of Interest list fetched from a web service using the SQLite database engine to make the list accessible when a device is offline.

Chapter 9, Making POIApp Location Aware, discusses the various options that developers have in order to make their apps location-aware, and this chapter also covers how to add logic to determine a device's location, the address of a location, and display a location in the map app.

Chapter 10, Adding the Camera App Integration, discusses the various options for integrating with a device camera to capture a picture of POIApp and upload the captured photo to a web service using the HTTP multipart form upload.

Chapter 11, Publishing an App to the App Store, discusses the various options for distributing Android apps and also covers how to prepare a Xamarin.Android app for distribution.

All the examples in this book can be completed using a 30-day trial version of Xamarin.Android. The examples were developed using Mac OS X (Yosemite), Xamarin Studio 5.9.3, and Xamarin.Android 5.1.3 (trial edition). Any later versions should work fine as long as they are valid Xamarin configurations. You can check the Xamarin website for specifics.

Xamarin.Android can also be used in other configurations, including Windows OS. In Windows OS, you can either use Xamarin Studio or the Visual Studio Xamarin plugin as an IDE of your choice. Using a different configuration from what was used while developing the examples of this book may result in slight variations in the screens or steps described in the book.

The examples provided in this book consume the REST web service developed in Java JAX-RS. You can deploy the web service code on your system to perform end-to-end testing, or alternatively, you can use the Apiary mock feed URLs provided in the code bundle. To deploy the web service code, you need MySQL and the Apache Tomcat™ application server.

This book for C# and .NET developers with a desire to develop Android apps using their existing skill sets. This book includes a step-by-step approach to build an Android application using the Xamarin platform which will be valuable whether you're an experienced mobile developer or making your first push.

It is assumed that you have some experience in software development and are familiar with the basic object-oriented development concept and practices. An understanding of C# syntax is a requirement and a good working knowledge of C# is a distinct advantage, though it is strictly not necessary.

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "These constants are placed in a Java source file named R.java."

A block of code is set as follows:

public override bool OnCreateOptionsMenu(IMenu menu)
{
    MenuInflater.Inflate(Resource.Menu.POIListViewMenu, menu);
    return base.OnCreateOptionsMenu(menu);
}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

  public override Dialog OnCreateDialog (Bundle savedInstanceState)
  {
    POIDetailFragment targetFragment = (POIDetailFragment) TargetFragment;
    string poiName = Arguments.GetString(“name“);

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Click on Step Over twice to watch the progress of the execution."

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