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 the chat app

It's time to start building the app. We recommend that you use the same solution we used in Chapter 8, Setting Up a Backend for a Chat App Using Azure Services, because this will make code sharing easier. In that solution, we created a Mobile App (Xamarin.Forms) called Chat:

Select the Blank template and iOS and Android as the platforms. Now that we have created the project, we will update all NuGet packages to the latest versions because the project templates are not updated as often as the packages that are used inside the templates are:

Creating the chat service

The first thing we will do is create a chat service that will be used by both the iOS and Android applications. To make the code more testable and to make it easier to replace the chat service if we want to use another provider in the future, we need to perform the following steps:

  1. In the Chat project, add a reference to the Chat.Messages project.
  2. Create a new folder in the Chat project called...