Xamarin Studio for Android Programming: A C# Cookbook

Over 110 hands-on recipes to help you get grips with Xamarin Studio and C# programming to develop market-ready Android applications

About This Book

• Create Android applications with C# and Xamarin
• Reuse your Android application to develop iOS and Windows Phone applications
• Leverage the easy-to-succeed recipes to exploit the latest Android releases and develop new applications

Who This Book Is For

If you have already developed an Android applications with Java and you now intend to use C# and Xamarin Studio’s capabilities, or if you have never taken the dive into mobiles, then this book is for you. It would be helpful to have some C# experience so you follow the recipes in this book, though knowledge of Android is not required.

What You Will Learn

• Build a GUI for your Android applications
• Explore Android activities and understand configuration changes
• Manage multiscreens, icons, and multimedia in your applications
• Start and bind Android services and create notifications
• Create beautiful applications using the camera and animations
• Effectively couple your phone’s hardware with applications
• Integrate advertisements and select the right advertisement providers for your applications

In Detail

Multiplatform applications have taken the development world by storm. This has revolutionized the selection of the right tools for the efficient development and deployment of applications. Xamarin studio is emerging as the preferred choice among .NET/C# developers. It enables them to design cross-platform applications using their favorite language and IDE. Xamarin studio is supported by the Mac OS and Windows platforms, and you can develop your own applications for iOS, Windows, or Android with its help.

This book takes you through all the stages of application development, right from getting started with Xamarin and developing a GUI to putting up your application on the store. The recipes will help you in acquiring sufficient knowledge to go about creating applications.

Starting with introducing Xamarin studio, its underlying technologies, and the Android ecosystem, the book goes on to cover the graphical aspects of creating Android applications. Moving on, you will learn more about data management with Android services. This is followed by techniques on how to interact with the Android OS and the phone’s hardware, before finally concluding with mobile advertisements and Google Play. By the end of this book, you will have discovered all the specialties related to developing Android application with Xamarin Studio.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Getting Started
Chapter 2: Mastering the Life and Death of Android Apps
Chapter 3: Building a GUI
Chapter 4: Using Android Resources
Chapter 5: Using On-Phone Data
Chapter 6: Populating Your GUI with Data
Chapter 7: Using Android Services
Chapter 8: Mastering Intents – A Walkthrough
Chapter 9: Playing with Advanced Graphics
Chapter 10: Taking Advantage of the Android Platform
Chapter 11: Using Hardware Interactions
Chapter 12: Debugging and Testing
Chapter 13: Monetizing and Publishing Your Applications