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)

Accessibility

When it comes to user interfaces, accessibility is often an afterthought or forgotten about completely. User interfaces are not just about good-looking icons, fonts, and fancy custom controls, they are also about how your users actually use the app. This means that you need to leverage the platform's accessibility APIs to ensure usability for as much of your potential audience as possible. Xamarin.Forms now provides some basic APIs for adding accessibility to your apps, so users who depend on screen readers can successfully interact with the screens of your app.

Supporting screen readers

One of the most common ways to bring accessibility to an app is to provide support for screen readers, which are used...