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)

Adding MVVM to the app

The first step of introducing MVVM into an app is to set up the structure by adding folders that will represent the core tenants of the pattern, such as Models, ViewModels, and Views. Traditionally, the Models and ViewModels live in a core library (usually, a portable class library or .NET standard library), whereas the Views live in a platform-specific library.

Thanks to the power of the Xamarin.Forms toolkit and its abstraction of platform-specific UI APIs, the Views in a Xamarin.Forms app can also live in the core library.

Just because the Views can live in the core library with the ViewModels and Models doesn't mean that separation between the UI and the app logic isn't important. As we will see in this chapter and throughout the rest of the book, the separation between the UI and app logic is instrumental in keeping the codebase maintainable, testable, and shareable.

When implementing a specific structure to support...