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)

Navigation and MVVM

One of the key purposes of the MVVM pattern is to isolate an app's presentation layer from its other layers. In doing so, an app's business logic is also isolated. One of the thoughts behind this isolation is to have a user interface that is only concerned with displaying data, and that is completely independent of how that data is stored, acquired, manipulated, or shared with the rest of the app. As explained in Chapter 2, MVVM and Data Binding, this is typically accomplished through data binding. In MVVM, the actions that a user performs on a page are bound to commands on that page's backing ViewModel. It is very common for these actions to result in a transition to another page—either by directly linking to it or by automatically navigating to a previous page after performing a task, such as saving data. Therefore, it makes sense to...