Book Image

Creating Cross-Platform C# Applications with Uno Platform

By : Matt Lacey, Marcel Alexander Wagner
Book Image

Creating Cross-Platform C# Applications with Uno Platform

By: Matt Lacey, Marcel Alexander Wagner

Overview of this book

Developers are increasingly being asked to build native applications that run on multiple operating systems and in the browser. In the past, this would have meant learning new technologies and making multiple copies of an application. But the Uno Platform allows you to use tools, languages, and APIs you already know from building Windows apps to develop apps that can also run on other platforms. This book will help you to create customer-facing as well as line-of-business apps that can be used on the device, browser, or operating system of your choice. This practical guide enables developers to put their C# and XAML knowledge to work by writing cross-platform apps using the Uno Platform. Packed with tips and practical examples, this book will help you to build applications for common scenarios. You'll begin by learning about the Uno Platform through step-by-step explanations of essential concepts, before moving on to creating cross-platform apps for different lines of business. Throughout this book, you'll work with examples that will teach you how to combine your existing knowledge to manage common development environments and implement frequently needed functionality. By the end of this Uno development book, you will have learned how to write your own cross-platform apps with the Uno Platform and use additional tools and libraries to speed up your app development process.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
1
Section 1: Getting to Know Uno Platform
4
Section 2: Writing and Developing Uno Platform Apps
9
Section 3: Test, Deploy, and Contribute

Platform-specific XAML and C#

While Uno Platform allows you to run your app on any platform without having to worry about the underlying platform-specific API, there are still cases where you might want to write code that is specific to a platform, for example, accessing native platform APIs.

Platform-specific C#

Writing platform-specific C# code is similar to writing architecture-specific or runtime-specific C# code. Uno Platform ships with a set of compiler symbols that will be defined when your code is being compiled for a specific platform. This is achieved using preprocessor directives. Preprocessor directives will only be respected by the compiler if the symbol was set for the compilation, otherwise, the compiler will completely ignore the preprocessor directive.

At the time of writing, Uno Platform comes with the following preprocessor directives:

  • NETFX_CORE for UWP
  • __ANDROID__ for Android
  • __IOS__ for iOS
  • HAS_UNO_WASM (or __WASM__) for the web using...