Book Image

Mastering Xamarin.Forms - Second Edition

By : Ed Snider
Book Image

Mastering Xamarin.Forms - Second Edition

By: 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)

The Xamarin.Forms navigation API

Along with abstracting common user interface elements into a multi-platform API, Xamarin.Forms also abstracts navigation for iOS, Android, and Windows into a single easy-to-use navigation service. Each mobile platform does navigation in a slightly different way and has a slightly different navigation API; however, at their core, they all accomplish similar tasks and in most cases use a stack structure—last in, first out.

The Xamarin.Forms navigation API uses stack-like terminology, closely resembling the navigation APIs of iOS. The Xamarin.Forms navigation API is exposed through the Xamarin.Forms.INavigation interface, which is implemented via the Navigation property that can be called from any Xamarin.Forms.VisualElement object, but typically Xamarin.Forms.Page. Xamarin.Forms.NavigationPage also implements the INavigation interface and...