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 covered the basics of Xamarin.Forms and how it can be very useful for building your own cross-platform applications. Xamarin.Forms shines for certain types of apps, but can be limiting if you need to write more complicated UIs or take advantage of native drawing APIs. We discovered how to use XAML for declaring our Xamarin.Forms UIs and understood how Xamarin.Forms controls are rendered on each platform. We also dived into the concepts of data-binding and how to use the MVVM design pattern with Xamarin.Forms. Last but not least, we began porting the XamSnap application from earlier in the book to Xamarin.Forms, and were able to reuse a lot of our existing code.

In the next chapter, we will cover the process of submitting applications to the iOS App Store and Google Play. Getting your app into the store can be a time-consuming process, but guidance from the next chapter will give you a head start.