Book Image

Mastering Xamarin.Forms - Second Edition

By : Hernandez, Ed Snider
Book Image

Mastering Xamarin.Forms - Second Edition

By: Hernandez, Ed Snider

Overview of this book

Discover how to extend and build upon the components of the Xamarin.Forms toolkit to develop effective, robust mobile app architecture. Starting with an app built with the basics of the Xamarin.Forms toolkit, we'll go step by step through several advanced topics to create a solution architecture rich with the benefits of good design patterns and best practices. We'll start by introducing a core separation between the app's user interface and the app's business logic by applying the MVVM pattern and data-binding. Then we will focus on building out a layer of plugin-like services that handle platform-specific utilities such as navigation and geo-location, as well as how to loosely use these services in the app with inversion of control and dependency injection. Next we'll connect the app to a live web-based API and set up offline synchronization. Then, we'll dive into testing the app logic through unit tests. Finally, we will setup Visual Studio App Center to automate building, testing, distributing and monitoring the app.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Introducing the app idea

Just like the beginning of many new mobile projects, we will start with an idea.
We will create a travel app named TripLog and, like the name suggests, it will be an app that will allow its users to log their travel adventures. Although the app itself will not solve any real-world problems, it will have features that will require us to solve real-world architecture and coding problems. The app will take advantage of several core concepts such as list views, maps, location services, and live data from a RESTful API, and we will apply patterns and best practices throughout this book to implement these concepts.

Defining features

Before we get started, it is important to understand the requirements and features of the TripLog app. We will do this by quickly defining some of the high-level things this app will allow its users to do:

  • View existing log entries (online and offline)
  • Add new log entries with the following data:
    • Title
    • Location using GPS
    • Date
    • Notes
    • Rating
  • Sign into the app