Book Image

Mastering Cross-Platform Development with Xamarin

Book Image

Mastering Cross-Platform Development with Xamarin

Overview of this book

The main goal of this book is to equip you with the required know-how to successfully analyze, develop, and manage Xamarin cross-platform projects using the most efficient, robust, and scalable implementation patterns. This book starts with general topics such as memory management, asynchronous programming, local storage, and networking, and later moves onto platform-specific features. During this transition, you will learn about key tools to leverage the patterns described, as well as advanced implementation strategies and features. The book also presents User Interface design and implementation concepts on Android and iOS platforms from a Xamarin and cross-platform perspective, with the goal to create a consistent but native UI experience. Finally, we show you the toolset for application lifecycle management to help you prepare the development pipeline to manage and see cross-platform projects through to public or private release.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Mastering Cross-Platform Development with Xamarin
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Local filesystem


On iOS, applications cannot programmatically access files external to the application sandbox (for example, an iOS application cannot programmatically navigate to the user's picture directory and pick a file). The bridge between the local filesystem and the iOS app's sandbox was limited to the image picker controller until iOS 8. iOS 8 introduces the new document picker controller and document provider API. In this interaction model, the application implementing the document provider extension creates the document picker UI and the host application uses this provided UI to let the user select the documents to be used in the host application execution (similar to the file open picker and provider capability on the Windows Runtime platform).

UIImagePickerController

For Android, on top of the local file storage that is only app-specific, applications have access to two other locations: public and private external storage (depending on the hardware). External storage in this context...