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)

Creating an API with Azure Functions

Almost all mobile apps communicate with an API to retrieve and store information. In many cases, as a mobile app developer, you might just have to use an API that already exists. However, if you're building your own product or service, you may need to create your own backend and web API.

There are several ways you can create an API, as well as several places you can host it, and certainly many different languages you can develop it in. For the purposes of this book, we will create a backend service and web API in the cloud using an Azure Function bound to Azure Table storage.

Azure Functions have a lot of capability and serve as a powerful "serverless" compute platform for numerous scenarios. You can create functions in Visual Studio or directly in the Azure portal and you can choose from .NET Core, Node.js, and several other runtime stacks. Since the primary focus of this book is developing a mobile app, I won't go too...