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 the linker


To keep Xamarin applications small and lightweight for mobile devices, Xamarin has created a feature for their compiler called the linker. Its main purpose is to strip unused code out of the core Mono assemblies (such as System.dll) and platform-specific assemblies (Mono.Android.dll and Xamarin.iOS.dll); however, it can also give you the same benefits if set up to run on your own assemblies. Without running the linker, the entire Mono framework can be around 30 megabytes. This is why linking is enabled by default in device builds, which enables you to keep your applications small.

The linker uses static analysis to work through the various code paths in an assembly. If it determines that a method or class is never used, it removes the unused code from that assembly. This can be a time-consuming process, so builds running in the simulator skip this step by default.

Xamarin applications have the following three main settings for the linker:

  • Don't Link: In this, the linker...