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)

Authentication

In the last chapter, we created a live web-based API using an Azure Function App and updated our app to use it instead of static, hardcoded data. When we created the API, we made it available anonymously, which means anyone can access the data within it. Most web-based APIs require some level of authentication. In some cases, it may be an API key you are provided by the API owner. In other cases, you may be required to sign in with credentials, in order to obtain an authorization token. Whether you are provided a key or granted a token through an authorization process, that key or token can then be used to authenticate all access to the API. In this chapter, we are going to update our API to require authorization, and update our app to allow users to sign in to access the API.

In this chapter, we'll cover the following topics:

  • Adding authentication to the Azure Function App
  • Using the Xamarin.Auth library to easily perform OAuth and securely communicate...