Book Image

Xamarin Blueprints

By : Michael Williams
Book Image

Xamarin Blueprints

By: Michael Williams

Overview of this book

Do you want to create powerful, efficient, and independent apps from scratch that will leverage the Xamarin framework and code with C#? Well, look no further; you’ve come to the right place! This is a learn-as-you-build practical guide to building eight full-fledged applications using Xamarin.Forms, Xamarin Android, and Xamarin iOS. Each chapter includes a project, takes you through the process of building applications (such as a gallery Application, a text-to-speech service app, a GPS locator app, and a stock market app), and will show you how to deploy the application’s source code to a Google Cloud Source Repository. Other practical projects include a chat and a media-editing app, as well as other examples fit to adorn any developer’s utility belt. In the course of building applications, this book will teach you how to design and prototype professional-grade applications implementing performance and security considerations.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Xamarin Blueprints
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Creating a global App.xaml


In all Xamarin.Forms projects we must create an Application file that inherits the Application class. We are going to extend this Application file and create a global resource dictionary. If you came from WPF you will recognize the use of a global resource dictionary that we can reference in all XAML sheets. This global resource dictionary is kept in the App.xaml file. It will have references to different converters, styles, and data templates. Rather than declaring static resource dictionaries at the top of every ContentPage or ContentView, we want to create only one dictionary that every XAML interface can access. This means we only create one dictionary at startup throughout the entire life of the application, rather than creating multiple dictionaries on views when they are displayed.

Let's create a new ContentPage, call it App.xaml, and place it in the Stocklist.XamForms project. We can now remove the App.cs file that already exists in this project. Inside...