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)

Adding authentication to Azure Functions

In the previous chapter, we set up a new, live backend using an Azure Function App. The service contains a single table named entry, which houses all log entries for our TripLog app and makes them available via an entry endpoint. Currently, the entry endpoint is available anonymously.

In this section, we'll change the permissions on the Azure Function App to require each request to contain an access token associated with an authenticated user.

Setting up an identity provider

There are a couple of approaches you can use to handle identity and authentication in Azure. You can set up the Azure Function App to use Facebook, Twitter, a Microsoft Account, Google, or even Azure Active Directory as a trusted identity provider. You can also create your own custom identity provider if you want to use account data stored in your database, instead of one of the social providers. You can use one of these options or a combination of several...