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 the SlidingTiles user interface using Storyboards

In this section, we will begin by constructing the user interface for our SlidingTiles application using Storyboards and the Visual Designer for iOS that is included as part of the Visual Studio for Mac IDE.

You will notice that our Main.storyboard already contains a View Controller, which we will be adding UI control elements to, such as a Label, a View, and two Buttons that will be used to reset the current game in progress, as well as randomly shuffling each of the tiles on our game board.

Let's start by opening the Storyboard for our SlidingTiles application and performing the following steps:

  1. Firstly, locate the Main.storyboard that is contained in the SlidingTiles solution.
  2. Next, double-click on the Main.storyboard file to display our Storyboard Canvas, as shown in the following screenshot:
Creating the...