Book Image

Mastering Xamarin.Forms - Third Edition

By : Ed Snider
Book Image

Mastering Xamarin.Forms - Third Edition

By: Ed Snider

Overview of this book

Discover how to extend and build upon the components of the most recent version of Xamarin.Forms to develop an effective, robust mobile app architecture. This new edition features Xamarin.Forms 4 updates, including CollectionView and RefreshView, new coverage of client-side validation, and updates on how to implement user authentication. Mastering Xamarin.Forms, Third Edition is one of the few Xamarin books structured around the development of a simple app from start to finish, beginning with a basic Xamarin.Forms app and going step by step through several advanced topics to create a solution architecture rich with the benefits of good design patterns and best practices. This book introduces a core separation between the app's user interface and the app's business logic by applying the MVVM pattern and data binding, and then focuses on building a layer of plugin-like services that handle platform-specific utilities such as navigation and geo-location, as well as how to loosely use these services in the app with inversion of control and dependency injection. You’ll connect the app to a live web-based API and set up offline synchronization before testing the app logic through unit testing. Finally, you will learn how to add monitoring to your Xamarin.Forms projects to track crashes and analytics and gain a proactive edge on quality.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

MVVM and Data Binding

In this chapter, we will take a look at the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern, the MVVM elements that are offered with the Xamarin.Forms toolkit, and how we can expand on them to truly take advantage of the power of the pattern. As we dig into these topics, we will apply what we have learned to the TripLog app that we started building in Chapter 1, Getting Started.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Understanding the MVVM pattern and data binding
  • Adding the MVVM pattern and data binding to the Xamarin.Forms mobile app created in Chapter 1, Getting Started
  • Adding client-side validation to the Xamarin.Forms mobile app created in Chapter 1, Getting Started

Before we start applying the MVVM pattern to our app we will review the basics of the pattern in the following section.