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)

Navigation

The overarching goal of this book is to show how you can build a solid architecture based on design patterns and best practices; the objective of this chapter is to take our TripLog app one step closer to achieving that goal. By introducing MVVM into our TripLog app in Chapter 2, MVVM and Data Binding, we set up the app with a very clear pattern to separate the user interface from the rest of the logic in the app. Each subsequent chapter, starting with this one, further advances this concept of separation.

In Chapter 2, MVVM and Data Binding, we moved a large portion of the app logic into ViewModels; however, navigation is still being initiated from the Pages (Views). In this chapter, we will create a navigation service that we can use to refactor any navigation logic out of the Page-level code and into the ViewModels. While doing this will not result in any noticeable differences when running the app, it will allow us to make navigation fit more naturally into the...