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)

Platform-Specific Services and Dependency Injection

This chapter will not teach you everything there is to know about inversion of control (IoC) and dependency injection, as there are numerous resources available that strictly focus on these topics alone. Instead, this chapter will focus on how these patterns apply to mobile development and, more specifically, how to implement them in a Xamarin.Forms mobile app.

The following is a quick look at what we'll cover in this chapter:

  • The need for dependency injection in multi-platform mobile app development
  • Implementing IoC and dependency injection using a third-party library in place of Xamarin.Forms DependencyService
  • Creating, injecting, and using platform-specific services
  • Updating our TripLog app to use platform-specific services through dependency injection

We'll get started by looking into why and how dependency injection plays an important role in mobile app development.