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)

Understanding the MVVM pattern

At its core, MVVM is a presentation pattern designed to control the separation between user interfaces and the rest of an application. The key elements of the MVVM pattern are as follows:

  • Models: Models represent the business entities of an application. When responses come back from an API, they are typically deserialized to Models.
  • Views: Views represent the actual pages or screens of an application, along with all of the elements that make them up, including custom controls. Views are very platform-specific and depend heavily on platform APIs to render the application's user interface (UI).
  • ViewModels: ViewModels control and manipulate the Views by serving as their data context. ViewModels are made up of a series of properties represented by Models. These properties are part of what is bound to the Views to provide the data that is displayed to users, or to collect the data that is entered or selected by users. In addition to Model...