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)

User Interface

There are a lot of things that go into delivering a great user experience in a mobile app, such as graphical design, ease of use, discoverability, accessibility, and intuitive controls, just to name a few. Graphical design is very important in a mobile app – it's largely what makes an app enjoyable to use – but just because an app is beautiful doesn't mean it's functional or easy to use. In this chapter, we are going to focus on some key concepts that will improve our app's overall user experience.

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

  • Leveraging platform-specific APIs to extend the default behavior of Xamarin.Forms controls with custom renderers
  • Manipulating the visual appearance of bound data with value converters
  • Leveraging basic accessibility APIs so that a user interface (UI) is friendly and easy to use for all audiences

We will start by creating a custom renderer for the date...