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)

An overview of the project

In this chapter, we are going to create a game that explores the fundamentals of AR. We are also going to learn how to integrate AR control in Xamarin.Forms. Android and iOS implement AR differently, so we will need to unify the platforms along the way. We will do this using UrhoSharp, an open source 3D game engine, which will do the rendering for us. This is simply made up of bindings to the Urho3D engine, which allows us to use Urho3D with .NET and C#.

The game will render boxes in AR that the user needs to tap to make disappear. You can then extend the game yourself by learning about the Urho3D engine.

The estimated build time for this project is 90 minutes.