Building Xamarin Forms Mobile Apps Using Xaml

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

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.

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#.

Modern Cross-Platform Development About This Book Build modern, cross-platform applications with .NET Core Get up to speed with C#, and up to date with all the latest features of C# 7 Start creating professional web applications with ASP.NET Core Who This Book Is For This book is targeted towards readers who have some prior programming experience or have a science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) background, and want to gain a solid foundation with C# and to be introduced to the types of applications they could build and will work cross-platform on Windows, Linux, and macOS. What You Will Learn Build cross-platform applications using C# 7 and .NET Core Explore ASP.NET Core and learn how to create professional web applications Improve your application's performance using multitasking Use Entity Framework Core and find out how to build code-first databases Master object-oriented programming with C# to increase code reuse and efficiency Familiarize yourself with cross-device app development using the Universal Windows Platform and XAML Query and manipulate data using LINQ Protect your data by using encryption and hashing In Detail If you want to build powerful cross-platform applications with C# 7 and .NET Core, then this book is for you. First, we'll run you through the basics of C#, as well as object-oriented programming, before taking a quick tour through the latest features of C# 7 such as tuples, pattern matching, out variables, and so on. After quickly taking you through C# and how .NET works, we'll dive into the .NET Standard 1.6 class libraries, covering topics such as performance, monitoring, debugging, serialization and encryption. The final section will demonstrate the major types of application that you can build and deploy cross-device and cross-platform. In this section, we'll cover Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps, web applications, mobile apps, and web services. Lastly, we'll look at how you can package and deploy your applications so that they can be hosted on all of today's most popular platforms, including Linux and Docker. By the end of the book, you'll be armed with all the knowledge you need to build modern, cross-platform applications using C# and .NET Core. Style and approach This book takes a step-by-step approach and is filled with exciting projects and fascinating theory. It uses three high-impact sections to equip you with all the tools you'll need to build modern, cross-platform applications using C# and .NET Core.

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.

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. 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?