Professional C# 7 and .NET Core 2.0, 7th Edition

37Xamarin.Forms

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Tools for Xamarin development
• Application architectures with Android and iOS
• Using Xamarin.Forms
• Pages
• Navigation
• Layout
• Views
• Data binding and commands

WROX.COM CODE DOWNLOADS FOR THIS CHAPTER

The wrox.com code downloads for this chapter are found at www.wrox.com on the Download Code tab. The source code is also available at https://github.com/ProfessionalCSharp/ProfessionalCSharp7 in the directories Xamarin and PatternsXamarinShared.

The code for this chapter is divided into the following major examples:

• AndroidSample
• iPhoneSample
• BooksAppX (Xamarin.Forms)

STARTING WITH XAMARIN DEVELOPMENT

Mobile app development is shared mainly between two products: iOS from Apple and Android from Google. Native development on iOS is done using the programming languages Objective-C or Swift and Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks. Cocoa is the name of Apple’s API. When developing for Android, you use the Android Software Development Kit from Google, and Java is the main programming language.

Instead of rewriting the code using different programming languages, you can use C# and XAML. Xamarin offers cross-platform development, and you can still use the native APIs.

As Xamarin was bought by Microsoft, and because the Xamarin tools integration in Visual Studio is becoming better and better, productivity can be increased with many apps using cross-platform technologies.

This chapter gives you an introduction to start creating Xamarin apps. Using ...