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)

Summary

In this chapter, we leveraged several key concepts in the Xamarin.Forms API to help improve the look, feel, and user experience of our TripLog app. With the use of a custom renderer, we are now able to tap directly into the platform-specific APIs to change the default behavior of Xamarin.Forms controls and, with the use of value converters, we are now able to alter the appearance of data when it is bound to the user interface. Finally, the Xamarin.Forms accessibility APIs give us the ability to make our app more straightforward for users who rely on accessibility features to use their mobile apps.

In the next chapter, we will connect the TripLog app to an API in order to work with live data.