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)

The Xamarin.Forms navigation API

Along with abstracting common user interface elements into a multi-platform API, Xamarin.Forms also abstracts navigation for iOS, Android, and Windows into a single easy-to-use navigation service. Each mobile platform does navigation in a slightly different way and has a slightly different navigation API; however, at their core, they all accomplish similar tasks, and, in most cases, use a stack structure – last in, first out.

The Xamarin.Forms navigation API uses stack-like terminology, closely resembling the navigation APIs of iOS. The Xamarin.Forms navigation API is exposed through the Xamarin.Forms.INavigation interface, which is implemented via the Navigation property that can be called from any Xamarin.Forms.VisualElement object. Typically, Xamarin.Forms.Page is the object used. Xamarin.Forms.NavigationPage also implements the Xamarin.Forms.INavigation interface and exposes public methods to perform common navigation tasks.

The Xamarin...