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)

Setting up the project

It's time to start coding! First, however, make sure you have your development environment set up, as described in Chapter 1, Introduction to Xamarin.

This chapter will be a classic File | New | Project chapter, guiding you step by step through the process of creating the app. There will be no downloads required whatsoever.

Creating the project

Follow these few steps in order to create the project:

  1. Open Visual Studio and click on File | New | Project, as shown in the following screenshot:

This will open up the Create a new project wizard.

  1. Enter xamarin forms in the search field and select the Mobile App (Xamarin.Forms) template, as shown in the following screenshot, and click Next:
  1. We will be calling our application WhackABox in this project, so let's enter that into the Project name field, as shown in the following screenshot, and click Create:
  1. Next, we select a project template. Select the Blank template option to create a bare minimum Xamarin...