Book Image

Xamarin.Forms Projects - Second Edition

By : Daniel Hindrikes, Johan Karlsson
Book Image

Xamarin.Forms Projects - Second Edition

By: Daniel Hindrikes, Johan Karlsson

Overview of this book

Xamarin.Forms is a lightweight cross-platform development toolkit for building apps with a rich user interface. Improved and updated to cover the latest features of Xamarin.Forms, this second edition covers CollectionView and Shell, along with interesting concepts such as augmented reality (AR) and machine learning. Starting with an introduction to Xamarin and how it works, this book shares tips for choosing the type of development environment you should strive for when planning cross-platform mobile apps. You’ll build your first Xamarin.Forms app and learn how to use Shell to implement the app architecture. The book gradually increases the level of complexity of the projects, guiding you through creating apps ranging from a location tracker and weather map to an AR game and face recognition. As you advance, the book will take you through modern mobile development frameworks such as SQLite, .NET Core Mono, ARKit, and ARCore. You’ll be able to customize your apps for both Android and iOS platforms to achieve native-like performance and speed. The book is filled with engaging examples, so you can grasp essential concepts by writing code instead of reading through endless theory. By the end of this book, you’ll be ready to develop your own native apps with Xamarin.Forms and its associated technologies, such as .NET Core, Visual Studio 2019, and C#.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Native applications

The term native application means different things to different people. For some people, it is an app that is developed using the tools specified by the creator of the platform, such as an app developed for iOS with Objective-C or Swift, an Android app developed with Java or Kotlin, or a Windows app developed with .NET. Others use the term native application to refer to apps that are compiled into machine code that is native. In this book, we will define a native application as one that has a native UI, performance, and API access. The following list explains these three concepts in greater detail:

  • Native UI: Apps built with Xamarin use the standard controls for each platform. This means, for example, that an iOS app built with Xamarin will look and behave as an iOS user would expect and an Android app built with Xamarin will look and behave as an Android user would expect.
  • Native performance: Apps built with Xamarin are compiled for native performance and can use platform-specific hardware acceleration.
  • Native API access: Native API access means that apps built with Xamarin can use everything that the target platforms and devices offer to developers.