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)

Developing our model layer


Since we have a good idea of what the application is, the next step is to develop the business objects or model layer of this application. Let's start out by defining a few classes that would contain the data to be used throughout the app. It is recommended, for the sake of organization, to add these to a Models folder in your project.

Let's begin with a class representing a user. The class can be created as follows:

public class User 
{ 
  //NOTE: we will treat this as a unique name 
  public string Name { get; set; } 
 
  //NOTE: we'll try to use this in a secure way 
  public string Password { get; set; } 
} 

Pretty straightforward so far; let's move on to create classes representing a conversation and a message as follows:

public class Conversation 
{ 
  public string Id { get; set; } 
 
  public string UserName { get; set; } 
} 
 
public class Message 
{ 
  public string Id ...