It's time to start coding! Before starting, 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 your first to-do list app. There will be no downloads required whatsoever.
Setting up the project
A Xamarin app can essentially be created by using one of two code-sharing strategies:
- As a shared project
- The .NET Standard library
The first choice, a shared project, creates a project that is essentially a linked copy of each file in it. The files exist in one common place and are linked in at build time. This means that we cannot determine the runtime when writing the code and we can only access the APIs that are available on each target platform. It does allow us to use conditional compilations, which can be useful in certain circumstances, but can also be confusing to someone who...