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)
Building Our First Xamarin.Forms App

In this chapter, we will create a to-do list app and, in doing so, explore all the bits and pieces of what makes up an app. We will look at creating pages, adding content to pages, navigating between pages, and creating a stunning layout. Well, stunning might be a bit of a stretch, but we will be sure to design the app so that you can tweak it to your needs once it is complete!

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

  • Setting up the project
  • Persisting data locally on a device
  • Using the repository pattern
  • What MVVM is and why it's a great fit for Xamarin.Forms
  • Using Xamarin.Forms pages (as views) and navigating between them
  • Using Xamarin.Forms controls in XAML
  • Using data binding
  • Using styling in Xamarin.Forms