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 and MVVM

One of the key purposes of the MVVM pattern is to isolate an app's presentation layer from its other layers. In doing so, an app's business logic is also isolated. One of the thoughts behind this isolation is to have a user interface that is only concerned with displaying data, and that is completely independent of how that data is stored, acquired, manipulated, or shared with the rest of the app. As explained in Chapter 2, MVVM and Data Binding, this is typically accomplished through data binding.

In MVVM, the actions that a user performs on a page are bound to commands on that page's backing ViewModel. It is very common for these actions to result in a transition to another page—either by directly linking to it or by automatically navigating to a previous page after performing a task, such as saving data. Therefore, it makes sense to rethink how we implement navigation in an app that leverages the MVVM pattern so that it can be controlled...