Book Image

Mobile Development with .NET - Second Edition

By : Can Bilgin
Book Image

Mobile Development with .NET - Second Edition

By: Can Bilgin

Overview of this book

Are you a .NET developer who wishes to develop mobile solutions without delving into the complexities of a mobile development platform? If so, this book is a perfect solution to help you build professional mobile apps without leaving the .NET ecosystem. Mobile Development with .NET will show you how to design, architect, and develop robust mobile applications for multiple platforms, including iOS, Android, and UWP using Xamarin, .NET Core, and Azure. With the help of real-world scenarios, you'll explore different phases of application development using Xamarin, from environment setup, design, and architecture to publishing. Throughout the book, you'll learn how to develop mobile apps using Xamarin and .NET Standard. You'll even be able to implement a web-based backend composed of microservices with .NET Core using various Azure services including, but not limited to, Azure Active Directory, Azure Functions. As you advance, you'll create data stores using popular database technologies such as Cosmos DB and data models such as the relational model and NoSQL. By the end of this mobile application development book, you'll be able to create cross-platform mobile applications that can be deployed as cloud-based PaaS and SaaS.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
1
Section 1: Understanding .NET
5
Section 2: Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms
9
Section 3: Azure Cloud Services
14
Section 4: Advanced Mobile Development
18
Section 5: Application Life Cycle Management

Creating our first microservice

For our mobile application, in Chapter 8, Creating a Datastore with Cosmos DB, we created a simple data access proxy that retrieves data from Cosmos DB. In this exercise, we will be creating small web API components that will expose various methods for CRUD operations on our collections.

Initial setup

Let's begin our implementation:

  1. First, create an ASP.NET Core project:

    Figure 9.2 – Creating an ASP.NET Project

  2. Once the project is created, do a quick test to check whether the dotnet core components are properly set up.
  3. Open a console window and navigate to the project folder. The following commands will restore the referenced packages and compile the application:
    dotnet restore
    dotnet build
  4. Once the application is built, we can use the run command and execute a GET call to the api/values endpoint:

    Figure 9.3 – First Run for the ASP.NET Core App

    This should result in the output of the values from the WeatherForecastController...