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)

Getting Started

The goal of this book is to focus on how to apply best practices and patterns to mobile apps built with Xamarin.Forms, and not on the actual Xamarin.Forms toolkit and
 API itself. The best way to achieve this goal is to build an app end to end, applying new concepts in each chapter. Therefore, the goal of this chapter is to simply put together the basic structure of a Xamarin.Forms mobile app codebase, which will serve as a foundation that we can build from throughout the rest of this book.

In this chapter, we will do the following:

  • Introduce and define the features of the app that we will build throughout the rest of the book
  • Create a new Xamarin.Forms mobile app with an initial app structure and user interface