In this chapter we will start to develop a new project, People Around Me, with the help of Xamarin.Forms and Web API. We'll start by creating a project on all three platforms (iOS, Android, and Windows Phone). Then, we'll go through the development process and end up with a working solution.
The first thing we'll do is prepare our development machine so it's ready to develop Xamarin.Forms applications. We'll download, install, and set up IDEs and emulators to debug our project.
We'll also develop a service application to act as a web backend. It's important to run some logic on a web backend, as it'll give us the ability to change that logic over time without any end users noticing. It's also good practice to store important client-generated data in the web backend.