Mobile Development with C#

Chapter 4. Accessing the Network

Now that you have built applications for all three platforms and have some code sharing techniques in your tool belt, it’s time to start applying them. Every good application needs to be able to connect to external resources, whether they are a complex set of web services or just a simple leaderboard. The .NET Framework provides a rich networking stack that makes it easy to interact with network resources. Since all three platforms are able to leverage the power of this framework, these built-in networking libraries provide a great common base to build upon, allowing for a large amount of code reuse between them.

Reaching into the Cloud

In this chapter, you will build a very simple Twitter client that can read in a list of tweets from a particular account and display them to the user. The user interface implementations will have to remain native to each platform, but it’s possible to share all of the code needed to actually interact with Twitter’s API, which will live entirely in the shared library. Even though the scope of this application is limited, it’s easy to see that in a full application with an expanded set of features, the ability to reuse your code will go a long way to save time both up front and down the line.

Shared Layer

Open up the SharedLibrary project and create a new folder named Chapter4, where all new shared classes from this chapter will be added. Add a new class to this folder named Tweet. This will be a simple data object to hold ...