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)

Creating a native iOS app using Visual Studio for Mac

In this section, we will take a look at how to create a native iOS solution for the first time. We will begin by developing the basic structure for our application, as well as designing the user interface for our Sliding Tiles game using Storyboards.

We will also learn how to create an Interface and Class for our GameTile, as well as implementing the various methods to create the GameBoard, and seeing how to shuffle game titles randomly in the GameBoard, and how to handle touch events in the GameBoard UI. Finally, we will learn how to work with and implement animations in our GameBoard UI for our SlidingTiles game, before launching our game in the iOS Simulator.

Before we can proceed, we need to create our SlidingTiles project. It is very simple to create this using Visual Studio for Mac. Simply follow the steps listed here...