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)

Understanding Apple's MVC pattern


Before getting too far with iOS development, it is really important to get a foundation on Apple's design pattern for developing on iOS. You might have used the Model View Controller (MVC) pattern with other technologies such as ASP.NET, but Apple implements this paradigm in a slightly different way. Apples core set of APIs for developing UIs for iOS applications is called UIKit. Xamarin applications can take full advantage of UIKit by directly using these APIs from C#. UIKit is heavily based on the MVC design pattern.

The MVC design pattern includes the following:

  • Model: This is the backend business logic driving the application. This can be any code that, for example, makes web requests to a server or saves data to a local SQLite database.

  • View: This is the actual user interface seen on the screen. In iOS terms, this is any class that derives from UIView. Examples are toolbars, buttons, and anything else the user would see on the screen and interact with...