Book Image

Xamarin 4.x Cross-Platform Application Development - Third Edition

By : Peppers
Book Image

Xamarin 4.x Cross-Platform Application Development - Third Edition

By: Peppers

Overview of this book

Xamarin is a leading cross-platform application development tool used by top companies such as Coca-Cola, Honeywell, and Alaska Airlines to build apps. Version 4 features significant updates to the platform including the release of Xamarin.Forms 2.0 and improvements have been made to the iOS and Android designers. Xamarin was acquired by Microsoft so it is now a part of the Visual Studio family. This book will show you how to build applications for iOS, Android, and Windows. You will be walked through the process of creating an application that comes complete with a back-end web service and native features such as GPS location, camera, push notifications, and other core features. Additionally, you’ll learn how to use external libraries with Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms to create user interfaces. This book also provides instructions for Visual Studio and Windows. This edition has been updated with new screenshots and detailed steps to provide you with a holistic overview of the new features in Xamarin 4.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Summary


In this chapter, we added libraries from the Xamarin Component Store to Xamarin projects and ported an existing C# library, Ninject, to both Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android. Next, we installed Objective Sharpie and explored its usage for generating Objective-C bindings. Finally, we wrote a functional Objective-C binding for the Google Analytics SDK for iOS and a Java binding for the Google Analytics SDK for Android. We also wrote several XPath expressions to clean up the Java binding.

There are several available options for using existing third-party libraries from your Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android applications. We looked at everything from using the Xamarin Component Store, porting existing code, and setting up Java and Objective-C libraries to be used from C#. In the next chapter, we will cover the Xamarin.Mobile library as a way to access a user's contacts, camera, and GPS location.