Xamarin Cross Platform Development Cookbook

A recipe-based practical guide to get you up and running with Xamarin cross-platform development

About This Book

• Gain the skills and expertise to create, test, and deploy native mobile applications in the three major mobile app stores that share up to 95% of the same code
• Learn development techniques that will allow you to use and create custom layouts for each platform, cross-platform UI
• Gain the knowledge needed to become more efficient in testing, deploying, and monitoring your applications, helping you through all stages of the software development life cycle

Who This Book Is For

This book is for mobile developers. You must have some basic experience of C# programming, but no previous experience with Xamarin is required. If you are just starting with C# and want to use Xamarin todevelop cross-platform apps effectively and efficiently, then this book is the right choice for you.

What You Will Learn

• Create and customize your cross-platform UI
• Understand and explore cross-platform patterns and practices
• Use the out-of-the-box services to support third-party libraries
• Find out how to get feedback while your application is used by your users
• Bind collections to ListView and customize its appearance with custom cells
• Create shared data access using a local SQLite database and a REST service
• Test and monitor your applications

In Detail

You can create native mobile applications using the Xamarin Forms platform for the three major platforms iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. The advantage of this is sharing as much code as you can, such as the UI, business logic, data models, SQLite data access, HTTP data access, and file storage across the three major platforms.

This book provide recipes on how to create an architecture that will be maintainable, extendable, use Xamarin Forms plugins to boost productivity, customize your views per platforms, and use platform-specific implementations at runtime.

We start with a simple creation of a Xamarin Forms solution with the three major platforms. We will then jump to XAML recipes and you will learn how to create a tabbed application page, and customize the style and behavior of views for each platform. Moving on, you will acquire more advanced knowledge and techniques while implementing views and pages for each platform and also calling native UI screens such as the native camera page.

Further on, we demonstrate the power of architecting a cross-platform solution and how to share code between platforms, create abstractions, and inject platform-specific implementations. Next, you will utilize and access hardware features that vary from platform to platform with cross-platform techniques. We’ll then show you the power of databinding offered by Xamarin Forms and how you can create bindable models and use them in XAML. You will learn how to handle user interactions with the device and take actions in particular events.

With all the work done and your application ready, you will master the steps of getting the app ready and publishing it in the app store.

Style and approach

This book will serve as a quick reference with a unique recipe-based approach that will engage you like never before as you create real-world cross-platform apps on your own.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. One Ring to Rule Them All
Chapter 2. Declare Once, Visualize Everywhere
Chapter 3. Native Platform-Specific Views and Behavior
Chapter 4. Different Cars, Same Engine
Chapter 5. Dude, Where’s my Data?
Chapter 6. One for All and All for One
Chapter 7. Bind to the Data
Chapter 8. A List to View
Chapter 9. Gestures and Animations
Chapter 10. Test Your Applications, You Must