Professional Visual Studio 2017

21Mobile Applications Using .NET

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Creating a Xamarin project for cross-platform applications
• Segregating UI and business logic concerns
• Debugging your app in Android and iOS

WROX.COM CODE DOWNLOADS FOR THIS CHAPTER

The wrox.com code downloads for this chapter can be found at www.wrox.com by searching for this book’s ISBN number (978-1-119-40458-3). The code and any related support files are located in their own folder for this chapter.

Developing cross-platform applications is a tricky business. It might sound like a cliché, but there’s a reason why there is no single, universal way to create applications that run on the iPhone, iPad, Android, and Windows platforms. In every case, there are trade-offs that have to be made, choices that will either limit the functionality that your application has or increase the complexity of the development effort.

Having painted that rosy picture, Visual Studio 2017 offers a couple of different approaches to creating mobile applications. In this chapter, we look at how the cross-platform development environment of Xamarin is integrated into Visual Studio. In Chapter 22, “Mobile Applications Using JavaScript,” we look at how HTML, JavaScript, and Apache Cordova can be used for cross-platform development.

USING XAMARIN

Xamarin is a tool that is used to create cross-platform applications, which is to say that it strives to provide the kind of “write-once, run anywhere” productivity that is the holy grail ...