Book Image

Mastering Xamarin UI Development - Second Edition

By : Steven F. Daniel
Book Image

Mastering Xamarin UI Development - Second Edition

By: Steven F. Daniel

Overview of this book

This book will provide you with the knowledge and practical skills that are required to develop real-world Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms applications. You’ll learn how to create native Android app that will interact with the device camera and photo gallery, and then create a native iOS sliding tiles game. You will learn how to implement complex UI layouts and create customizable control elements based on the platform, using XAML and C# 7 code to interact with control elements within your XAML ContentPages. You’ll learn how to add location-based features by to your apps by creating a LocationService class and using the Xam.Plugin.Geolocator cross-platform library, that will be used to obtain the current device location. Next, you’ll learn how to work with and implement animations and visual effects within your UI using the PlatformEffects API, using C# code. At the end of this book, you’ll learn how to integrate Microsoft Azure App Services and use the Twitter APIs within your app. You will work with the Razor Templating Engine to build a book library HTML5 solution that will use a SQLite.net library to store, update, retrieve, and delete information within a local SQLite database. Finally, you will learn how to write unit tests using the NUnit and UITest frameworks.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Summary

In this chapter, we learned how to download and install the Visual Studio for Mac IDE, along with the Xamarin Platform SDKs. We then explored the Visual Studio for Mac IDE environment and how we can use the Preferences pane to customize the look and feel of the Visual Studio for Mac IDE. Next, we looked at how to configure and include additional .NET Runtimes, as well as how to go about defining your Android and iOS SDK locations. We also learned about the Xamarin mobile platform and the benefits of developing native versus Xamarin.Forms apps using it.

We then learned how to create a cross-platform Xamarin project for both iOS and Android platforms, create the user interface using the XAML syntax, then write the C# code that will be used to communicate with the XAML to populate the ListView control with planet names, before launching this in the iOS simulator.

Next, we learned how to set Breakpoints, as well as create conditional Breakpoints in your code; we learned how to use the Breakpoints Pad to view all existing Breakpoints that have been set in your PlanetaryApp solution.

Finally, we learned about the built-in debugger in the Visual Studio for Mac IDE, and how you can step through your code and use the Immediate window to print the contents of your variables. In the next chapter, you will learn how to build a Photo Library app using Xamarin.Android and C#.