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)

Validation

In software, data validation is a process that ensures the validity and integrity of user input and usually involves checking that data is in the correct format and contains an acceptable value. There are typically two types of validation when building apps: server-side and client-side. Both play an important role in the lifecycle of an app's data. Server-side validation is critical when it comes to security, making sure malicious data or code doesn't make its way into the server or backend infrastructure. Client-side validation is usually more about user experience than security. A mobile app should always validate its data before sending it to a backend (such as a web API) for a number of reasons, including the following:

  • To provide real-time feedback to the user about any issues instead of waiting on a response from the backend
  • To support saving data in offline scenarios where the backend is not available
  • To prevent encoding issues when sending...