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)

Setting up a development machine

Developing an app for multiple platforms imposes higher demands on our development machine. One reason for this is that we often want to run one or multiple simulators or emulators on our development machine. Different platforms also have different requirements with regard to what is needed to begin development. Regardless of whether we use macOS or Windows, Visual Studio will be our integrated development environment (IDE). There are several versions of Visual Studio, including the free community edition. Go to https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/ to compare the available versions. The following list is a summary of what we need to begin development for each platform:

  • iOS: To develop an app for iOS, we need a Macintosh (Mac) device. This could either be the machine that we are developing on or a machine on our network, if we are using one. The reason we need to connect to a Mac is that we need to use Xcode to compile and debug an app. Xcode also provides...