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)

Adding a sign in page

In order to add sign in capabilities to our app, we will need to create a new Page and a new ViewModel. The ViewModel will be pretty straightforward, containing just a single command that handles signing in to Facebook via the IAuthService interface, passing the received Facebook token to the Azure backend service through the ITripLogDataService, and then storing the Azure access token in local settings.

There are a couple of ways to tap into the local storage platform-specific APIs to store settings. One way is to roll your own, similar to how we did the geolocation service: creating a core interface that is implemented uniquely per platform. Another alternative is to leverage a plugin or other third-party library that has already been created and published. In this section, we will use a plugin called Settings Plugin for Xamarin and Windows, available on...