Book Image

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

By : Jonathan Peppers
Book Image

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

By: Jonathan 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 (19 chapters)
Xamarin 4.x Cross-Platform Application Development - Third Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Using ListView and BaseAdapter


Now let's implement a conversations list on Android. The Android equivalent of UITableView and UITableViewSource are ListView and BaseAdapter. There are parallel concepts for these Android classes, such as implementing abstract methods and recycling cells during scrolling. There are a few different types of adapters used in Android such as ArrayAdapter or CursorAdaptor, although BaseAdapter is generally best suited for simple lists.

Let's implement our conversations screen. Begin by making a new Android Activity in your Activities folder named ConversationsActivity.cs. Let's start with only a couple of changes to the class definition, as follows:

[Activity(Label = "Conversations")] 
public class ConversationsActivity :
   BaseActivity<MessageViewModel> 
{ 
  //Other code here later 
} 

Perform the following steps to implement a couple of Android layouts:

  1. Create a new Android Layout in the layout folder of the Resources directory...