Chapter 1, Building a Gallery Application, provides you a walkthrough for native development with Xamarin by building an iOS and Android application that will read from your local gallery files and display them into a UITableView and ListView.

Chapter 2, Build a SpeechTalk Application, provides you a walkthrough of Xamarin.Forms development by building an iOS, Android and Windows Phone application that will use platform speech services to talk text typed into a text field.

Chapter 3, Building a GPS Locator Application, shows you how to build a Xamarin.Forms application that integrates native GPS location services and Google Maps APIs. We will cover more content on IoC containers, the Xamarin.Forms.Maps library, and techniques for C# async and background tasks.

Chapter 4, Building an Audio Player Application, in this chapter, we will integrate native audio functions for processing a sound file using the AVFramework in iOS, and MediaPlayer framework in Android.

Chapter 5, Building a Stocklist Application, in this chapter we look at detailing our XAML interfaces using CustomRenderers, Styles, and ControlTemplates. We also build a simple web service and setup a JSON feed for our mobile application.

Chapter 6, Building a Chat Application, in this chapter our user interface will move away from MVVM design and follow a new paradigm called MVP (Model-View-Presenter). We take another step further into the backend and set up a SignalR hub and client to simulate a chat service, where data will be sent between the server and clients instantly as the messages become available. Another key topic of focus is the project architecture, spending time on separating the project into modules, and creating a nicely tiered structure that will maximize code sharing across different platforms.

Chapter 7, Building a File Storage Application, in this chapter we walk through more development using Xamarin.Forms. We look at Behaviors and their use with user interfaces. We also build a custom layout using the Layout <View> framework and build our first SQLite database for storing text files.

Chapter 8, Building a Camera Application, our last chapter, will introduce Effects and Triggers. We learn how to apply them to user interfaces and use them with Styles. We also build multiple complex CustomRenderers for native platform cameras, tinting images and receiving touch events.

Xamarin Studio

To install a copy of Xamarin Studio visit the following link:

https://www.xamarin.com/download

Building Windows Phone Applications

In order to build windows phone applications, you will need a computer with Windows, Microsoft Visual Studio, and the Universal Windows Platform SDK installed.

Running solutions

You will also need an iOS, android and windows phone device for testing. If you don’t have access to devices, you will have to install simulators for each platform.

iOS

Simulators can be installed via XCode. If you haven’t got XCode installed, you will need to install a fresh copy.

Android

Please install a copy of Geny Motion from the link below:

https://www.genymotion.com/

Windows Phone

The UWP SDK comes with simulators for Microsoft Visual Studio.

If you are a mobile developer looking to create interesting and fully featured apps for different platforms, then this book is the ideal solution for you. A basic knowledge of Xamarin and C# programming is assumed.

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: "Yes, it is our AppDelegate file; notice the .cs on the end."

A block of code is set as follows:

 private void handleAssetsLoaded (object sender, EventArgs e) 
        { 
            _source.UpdateGalleryItems (_imageHandler.CreateGalleryItems()); 
            _tableView.ReloadData (); 
        }

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: "To do so, we simply select File | New | Solution and select an iOS Single View App."

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