This second Preview Edition ebook, now with 16 chapters, is about writing applications for Xamarin.Forms, the new mobile development platform for iOS, Android, and Windows phones unveiled by Xamarin in May 2014. Xamarin.Forms lets you write shared user-interface code in C# and XAML that maps to native controls on these three platforms.

Leverage Xamarin.Forms to build iOS and Android apps using a single, cross-platform approach. This book is the XAML companion to the C# guide Xamarin Mobile Application Development. You'll begin with an overview of Xamarin.Forms, then move on to an in-depth XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language) primer covering syntax, namespaces, markup extensions, constructors, and the XAML standard. XAML gives us both the power of decoupled UI development and the direct use of Xamarin.Forms elements. This book explores the core of the Xamarin.Forms mobile app UI: using layouts and FlexLayouts to position controls and views to design and build screens, formatting your UI using resource dictionaries, styles, themes and CSS, then coding user interactions with behaviors, commands, and triggers. You'll see how to use XAML to build sophisticated, robust cross-platform mobile apps and help your user get around your app using Xamarin.Forms navigation patterns. Building Xamarin.Forms Mobile Apps Using XAML explains how to bind UI to data models using data binding and using the MVVM pattern, and how to customize UI elements for each platform using industry-standard menus, effects, custom renderers, and native view declaration. What You Will Learn Create world-class mobile apps for iOS and Android using C# and XAMLBuild a XAML UI decoupled from the C# code behind Design UI layouts such as FrameLayout, controls, lists, and navigation patterns Style your app using resource dictionaries, styles, themes, and CSS Customize controls to have platform-specific features using effects, custom renderers, and native views Who This Book Is For XAML and C# developers, architects, and technical managers as well as many Android and iOS developers

Xamarin Mobile Application Development is a hands-on Xamarin.Forms primer and a cross-platform reference for building native Android, iOS, and Windows Phone apps using C# and .NET. This book explains how to use Xamarin.Forms, Xamarin.Android, and Xamarin.iOS to build business apps for your customers and consumer apps for Google Play and the iTunes App Store. Learn how to leverage Xamarin.Forms for cross-platform development using the most common UI pages, layouts, views, controls, and design patterns. Combine these with platform-specific UI to craft a visually stunning and highly interactive mobile user experience. Use Xamarin.Forms to data bind your UI to both data models and to view models for a Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) implementation. Use this book to answer the important question: Is Xamarin.Forms right for my project? Platform-specific UI is a key concept in cross-platform development, and Xamarin.Android and Xamarin.iOS are the foundation of the Xamarin platform. Xamarin Mobile Application Development will cover how to build an Android app using Xamarin.Android and an iOS app using Xamarin.iOS while sharing a core code library. SQLite is the database-of-choice for many Xamarin developers. This book will explain local data access techniques using SQLite.NET and ADO.NET. Build a mobile data access layer (DAL) using SQLite and weigh your options for web services and enterprise cloud data solutions. This book will show how organize your Xamarin code into a professional-grade application architecture. Explore solution-building techniques from starter-to-enterprise to help you decouple your functional layers, manage your platform-specific code, and share your cross-platform classes for code reuse, testability, and maintainability. Also included are 250+ screenshots on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone and 200+ C# code examples with downloadable C# and XAML versions available from Apress.com. This comprehensive recipe and reference book addresses one of the most important and vexing problems in the software industry today: How do we effectively design and develop cross-platform mobile applications?

Learn the bare essentials needed to begin developing cross-platform, mobile apps using Xamarin.Forms. Apps can be easily deployed to Google Play or to the Apple App Store. You will gain insight on architecture and how to arrange your app's design, where to begin developing, what pitfalls exist, and how to avoid them. Also covered are expected new features in Xamarin.Forms 3.0, so you may be prepared ahead of time for what the next release brings. Xamarin.Forms Essentials provides a brief history of Xamarin as a company, including how their product has become one of the most-used, cross-platform technologies for enterprise applications and app development across the world. Examples in the book are built around a real-life example that is an actual app in Google Play and in the Apple App Store, and has thousands of downloads between iOS and Android. You will learn how an application is set up from scratch, and you will benefit from the author's hard-won experience and tips in addressing various development challenges. What You'll Learn Create cross-platform user interfaces from one code base for both iOS and Android See how a commercial application is built and then deployed for sale in the app stores Integrate your Xamarin.Forms applications with third-party, RESTful APIs Arrange application architecture to avoid pitfalls and optimize your design Get a heads-up on new features released as part of Xamarin.Forms 3.0 Choose appropriately between Xamarin.Forms and traditional Xamarin, depending upon your application needs and its goals Who This Book Is For Mobile app developers who are producing software for multiple platforms, including Google Android and Apple iOS. Readers should be familiar with Visual Studio either on Mac OS X or Windows, and have a working knowledge of C#.

Learn to build cross-platform mobile apps using the latest features in Xamarin.Forms 4 with the help of a series of projects including apps for real-time chatting, AR games, location-tracking, weather, photo galleries, and much more Key FeaturesDevelop mobile apps, AR games, and chatbots of varying complexity with the help of real-world examplesExplore the important features of Xamarin.Forms 4 such as Shell, CollectionView, and CarouselViewGet to grips with advanced concepts such as AR and VR and machine learning for mobile developmentBook Description Xamarin.Forms is a lightweight cross-platform development toolkit for building apps with a rich user interface. Improved and updated to cover the latest features of Xamarin.Forms, this second edition covers CollectionView and Shell, along with interesting concepts such as augmented reality (AR) and machine learning. Starting with an introduction to Xamarin and how it works, this book shares tips for choosing the type of development environment you should strive for when planning cross-platform mobile apps. You’ll build your first Xamarin.Forms app and learn how to use Shell to implement the app architecture. The book gradually increases the level of complexity of the projects, guiding you through creating apps ranging from a location tracker and weather map to an AR game and face recognition. As you advance, the book will take you through modern mobile development frameworks such as SQLite, .NET Core Mono, ARKit, and ARCore. You’ll be able to customize your apps for both Android and iOS platforms to achieve native-like performance and speed. The book is filled with engaging examples, so you can grasp essential concepts by writing code instead of reading through endless theory. By the end of this book, you’ll be ready to develop your own native apps with Xamarin.Forms and its associated technologies, such as .NET Core, Visual Studio 2019, and C#. What you will learnSet up Xamarin.Forms to build native apps with code-sharing capabilitiesUnderstand the core aspects of developing a mobile app, such as its layout, UX, and renderingUse custom renderers to gain platform-specific accessDiscover how to create custom layouts for your apps with Xamarin.Forms ShellUse Azure SignalR to implement serverless services in your Xamarin appsCreate an augmented reality (AR) game for Android and iOS using ARCore and ARKit, respectivelyBuild and train machine learning models using CoreML, TensorFlow, and Azure Cognitive ServicesWho this book is for This book is for C# and .NET developers who want to learn Xamarin.Forms and get started with native Xamarin mobile application development from the ground up. Working knowledge of Visual Studio will help you to get the most out of this book.

Summary Xamarin in Action teaches you to build cross-platform mobile apps using Xamarin and C#. You'll explore all the layers of a Xamarin app, from design to deployment. By the end, you'll be able to build a quality, production-ready Xamarin app on iOS and Android from scratch with a high level of code reuse. Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the Technology Rewriting the same app for iOS and Android is tedious, error-prone, and expensive. Microsoft's Xamarin drastically reduces dev time by reusing most application code—typically 70% or more. The core of your iOS and Android app is shared; you write platform-specific code only for the UI layer. And because Xamarin uses C#, your apps benefit from everything this modern language and the .NET ecosystem have to offer. About the Book Xamarin in Action teaches you to build cross-platform mobile apps using Xamarin and C#. You'll explore all the layers of a Xamarin app, from design to deployment. Xamarin expert Jim Bennett teaches you design practices that maximize code reuse and isolate device-specific code, making it a snap to incorporate the unique features of each OS. What's Inside Understanding MVVM to maximize code reuse and testability Creating cross-platform model and UI logic layers Building device-specific UIs Unit and automated UI testing Preparing apps for publication with user tracking and crash analytics About the Reader Readers should have some experience with C#. Mobile development experience is helpful, but not assumed. About the Author Jim Bennett is a Xamarin MYP, Microsoft MVP, and Senior Cloud Developer Advocate at Microsoft, specializing in Xamarin mobile apps. He's a frequent speaker at events all around the world, including Xamarin user groups and Xamarin and Microsoft conferences. He regularly blogs about Xamarin development at https://jimbobbennett.io. Table of Contents PART 1 - GETTING STARTED WITH XAMARIN Introducing native cross-platform applications with Xamarin Hello MVVM—creating a simple cross-platform app using MVVM MVVM—the model-view–view model design pattern Hello again, MVVM—understanding and enhancing our simple MVVM app What are we (a)waiting for? An introduction to multithreading for Xamarin apps PART 2 - BUILDING APPS Designing MVVM cross-platform apps Building cross-platform models Building cross-platform view models Building simple Android views Building more advanced Android views Building simple iOS views Building more advanced iOS views PART 3 - FROM WORKING CODE TO THE STORE Running mobile apps on physical devices Testing mobile apps using Xamarin UITest Using App Center to build, test, and monitor apps Deploying apps to beta testers and the stores

Create high-quality multi-platform native apps with Xamarin.Forms Key Features Packed with real-world scenarios and solutions to help you build professional-grade mobile apps with Xamarin.Forms Build an effective mobile app architecture with the Xamarin.Forms toolkit Find out how, when, and why you should use architectural patterns and get best practices with Xamarin.Forms Book Description Discover how to extend and build upon the components of the Xamarin.Forms toolkit to develop an effective, robust mobile app architecture. Starting with an app built with the basics of the Xamarin.Forms toolkit, you'll go step by step through several advanced topics to create a solution architecture rich with the benefits of good design patterns and best practices. You'll start by introducing a core separation between the app's user interface and its business logic by applying the MVVM pattern and data-binding. Then you focus on building out a layer of plugin-like services that handle platform-specific utilities such as navigation and geo-location, and on how to loosely use these services in the app with inversion of control and dependency injection. Next you connect the app to a live web-based API and set up offline synchronization. Then, you delve into testing the app logic through unit tests. Finally, you set up Visual Studio App Center for monitoring usage and bugs to gain a proactive edge on app quality. What you will learn Implement the Model-View-View-Model (MVVM) pattern and data-binding in Xamarin.Forms mobile apps Extend the Xamarin.Forms navigation API with a custom ViewModel-centric navigation service Leverage the inversion of control and dependency injection patterns in Xamarin.Forms mobile apps Work with online and offline data in Xamarin.Forms mobile apps Test business logic in Xamarin.Forms mobile apps Use platform-specific APIs to build rich custom user interfaces in Xamarin.Forms mobile apps Explore how to improve mobile app quality using Visual Studio AppCenter Who this book is for This book is intended for C# developers who are familiar with the Xamarin platform and the Xamarin.Forms toolkit. If you have already started working with Xamarin.Forms and want to take your app to the next level with higher quality, maintainability, testability, and flexibility, then this book is for you.