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 authentication service

Now that we have enabled our backend service with Facebook authentication, the app as it is from the previous chapter will fail to load content. In this section, we will update the app to authenticate users with Facebook via OAuth and obtain an access token from Azure that can be used in subsequent API calls by the TripLogApiDataService.

As in the previous chapter, instead of using the identity provider's SDK, we will directly call the API endpoints behind the SDK, to better understand the approach to authenticate to an API in a more generic way. In order to do this, we first make an OAuth call to Facebook, obtaining a Facebook token. We then pass that token to an Azure App Service authentication endpoint, where it is validated using the Facebook app ID and the secret that was added to the service's configuration in Azure, to finally receive the access token needed to make calls to the Function App endpoints.

Performing OAuth in a...