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#.

Explore Xamarin.Forms to develop dynamic applications Key FeaturesExplore SQLite through Xamarin to store locations for various location-based applicationsMake a real-time serverless chat service by using Azure SignalR serviceBuild Augmented Reality application with the power of UrhoSharp together with ARKit and ARCore Book Description Xamarin.Forms is a lightweight cross-platform development toolkit for building applications with a rich user interface. In this book you'll start by building projects that explain the Xamarin.Forms ecosystem to get up and running with building cross-platform applications. We'll increase in difficulty throughout the projects, making you learn the nitty-gritty of Xamarin.Forms offerings. You'll gain insights into the architecture, how to arrange your app's design, where to begin developing, what pitfalls exist, and how to avoid them. The book contains seven real-world projects, to get you hands-on with building rich UIs and providing a truly cross-platform experience. It will also guide you on how to set up a machine for Xamarin app development. You'll build a simple to-do application that gets you going, then dive deep into building advanced apps such as messaging platform, games, and machine learning, to build a UI for an augmented reality project. By the end of the book, you'll be confident in building cross-platforms and fitting Xamarin.Forms toolkits in your app development. You'll be able to take the practice you get from this book to build applications that comply with your requirements. What you will learnSet up a machine for Xamarin developmentGet to know about MVVM and data bindings in Xamarin.FormsUnderstand how to use custom renderers to gain platform-specific accessDiscover Geolocation services through Xamarin EssentialsCreate an abstraction of ARKit and ARCore to expose as a single API for the game Learn how to train a model for imageclassification with Azure Cognitive ServicesWho this book is for This book is for mobile application developers who want to start building native mobile apps using the powerful Xamarin.Forms and C#. Working knowledge of C#, .NET, and Visual Studio is required.

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?

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

New edition of the bestselling guide to building an effective mobile app architecture with Xamarin.Forms 4 that maximizes the overall quality of apps. Key FeaturesUpdated for Xamarin.Forms 4Packed with real-world scenarios and solutions to help you build professional grade mobile apps with Xamarin.FormsIncludes design patterns and best practice techniques that every mobile developer should knowBook Description Discover how to extend and build upon the components of the most recent version of Xamarin.Forms to develop an effective, robust mobile app architecture. This new edition features Xamarin.Forms 4 updates, including CollectionView and RefreshView, new coverage of client-side validation, and updates on how to implement user authentication. Mastering Xamarin.Forms, Third Edition is one of the few Xamarin books structured around the development of a simple app from start to finish, beginning with a basic Xamarin.Forms app and going step by step through several advanced topics to create a solution architecture rich with the benefits of good design patterns and best practices. This book introduces a core separation between the app's user interface and the app's business logic by applying the MVVM pattern and data binding, and then focuses on building a layer of plugin-like services that handle platform-specific utilities such as navigation and geo-location, as well as how to loosely use these services in the app with inversion of control and dependency injection. You’ll connect the app to a live web-based API and set up offline synchronization before testing the app logic through unit testing. Finally, you will learn how to add monitoring to your Xamarin.Forms projects to track crashes and analytics and gain a proactive edge on quality. What you will learnFind out how, when, and why to use architecture patterns and best practices with Xamarin.FormsImplement the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern and data binding in Xamarin.Forms mobile appsIncorporate client-side validation in Xamarin.Forms mobile appsExtend the Xamarin.Forms navigation API with a custom ViewModel-centric navigation serviceLeverage the inversion of control and dependency injection patterns in Xamarin.Forms mobile appsWork with online and offline data in Xamarin.Forms mobile appsUse platform-specific APIs to build rich custom user interfaces in Xamarin.Forms mobile appsExplore how to monitor mobile app quality using Visual Studio App CenterWho this book is for This book is intended for .NET developers who are familiar with Xamarin mobile application development and the open source Xamarin.Forms toolkit. If you have already started working with Xamarin.Forms and want to take your app to the next level, making it more maintainable, testable and flexible, then this book is for you.

If you are an experienced iOS and Android developer and have a desire to learn about the Xamarin platform, then you will find this tutorial to be the most efficient, interesting, and relevant path. You will find this guide to be especially useful if you wish to become proficient in creating apps using the Xamarin platform, as Xamarin Essentials teaches you the fundamentals of iOS and Android development.