Getting Started
The goal of this book is to focus on how to apply best practices and patterns to mobile apps built with Xamarin.Forms, and not on the actual Xamarin.Forms toolkit and API itself. The best way to achieve this goal is to build an app end to end, applying new concepts in each chapter.
Therefore, the goal of this chapter is to simply put together the basic structure of a Xamarin.Forms mobile app code base, which will serve as a foundation that we can build from throughout the rest of this book.
In this chapter, we will do the following:
- Introduce and define the features of the app that we will build throughout the rest of the book
- Create a new Xamarin.Forms mobile app with an initial app structure and user interface
In the next chapter we'll introduce the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern and add data bindings to the user interface we create in this chapter. From there we will build upon the app and its architecture, introducing best practices and patterns for things like platform-specific API dependencies, dependency injection, remote data access, authentication, and unit testing. But, just like the beginning of many new mobile projects, we will start with an idea.