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)

Offline data caching

Mobile apps have several benefits over web apps, one of which is the ability to operate offline and maintain offline data. There are a couple of reasons why offline data is important to a mobile app. First of all, you cannot guarantee that your app will always have a network connection and the ability to directly connect to live data. Supporting offline data allows users to use the app, even if only for limited use cases when they are operating with limited or no connectivity. Secondly, users expect mobile apps to offer high performance, specifically, quick access to data without having to wait.

By maintaining an offline cache, an app can present a user with data immediately while it's busy retrieving a fresh dataset, providing a perceived level of performance to the user. It is important that when the cache updates, the user receives that updated data automatically so that they are always seeing the latest data possible, depending on specific use cases...