Book Image

Xamarin.Forms Projects - Second Edition

By : Hindrikes, Karlsson
Book Image

Xamarin.Forms Projects - Second Edition

By: Hindrikes, 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)

Xamarin and Mono

Xamarin is a developer platform that is used to develop native applications for iOS (Xamarin.iOS), Android (Xamarin.Android), and macOS (Xamarin.Mac). It is technically a binding layer on top of these platforms. Binding to platform APIs enables .NET developers to use C# (and F#) to develop native applications with the full capacity of each platform. The C# APIs we use when we develop apps with Xamarin are more or less identical to the platform APIs, but they are .NETified. For example, APIs are often customized to follow .NET naming conventions and the Android set and get methods are often replaced by properties. The reason for this is that APIs should be easier to use for .NET developers.

Mono (https://www.mono-project.com) is an open source implementation of the Microsoft .NET framework, which is based on the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) standards for C# and the Common Language Runtime (CLR). Mono was created to bring the .NET framework to platforms...