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 a News App Using Xamarin.Forms Shell

In this chapter, we will create a news app that leverages the new Shell navigation functionality provided to us by the Xamarin team at Microsoft. The old way still works—no worries, but we are sure that you will enjoy the new way of defining the structure of your app. Also, you can mix and match old and new as well.

By the end of this chapter, you will have learned how to define an app structure using Shell, consume data from a REST API and configure navigation and passing data between views using query style routes.

So what is Shell, then? In Shell, you define the structure of your app using Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) instead of hiding it in spread-out pieces of code in your app. You can also navigate using routes, just like those fancy web developers are doing.

The following topics will be covered in this...