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)

Visual Studio App Center

Visual Studio App Center is a service provided by Microsoft that offers a comprehensive mobile DevOps toolchain. One of the biggest barriers to entry when it comes to setting up the DevOps tooling is the amount of configuration, integration, and maintenance that is involved. In my experience, setting up DevOps tools means integrating several services, writing tons of scripts, and typically dedicating a developer to maintaining the build server. App Center offers a streamlined solution that minimizes configuration and pretty much eliminates integration and maintenance since it is a centralized and hosted service.

All of the components of App Center can be accessed via the App Center website or API. The monitoring components also require the App Center SDK to be included in your mobile app package. For Xamarin apps, the SDK is available via NuGet.

This...