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)

API Data Access

So far in this book, we have worked with static data that is hardcoded directly into the TripLog app itself. However, in the real world, it is rare that an app depends purely on local static data—most mobile apps get their data from a remote data source, typically an API. In some cases, an app may communicate with a third-party API, that of a social network, for example. Alternatively, developers sometimes create their own API to make data available for their apps. In this chapter, we will create a simple API in the cloud that we can connect to and retrieve data from in the TripLog app.

The following is a quick look at what we will cover in this chapter:

  • Creating a live, cloud-based, backend service and API using Microsoft's Azure App Service platform to store and retrieve TripLog data
  • Creating a data access service that handles communication with...