Xamarin in Action

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.

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.

Table of Contents

PART1 GETTING STARTED WITH XAMARIN

1 ■ Introducing native cross-platform applications with Xamarin

2 ■ Hello MVVM—creating a simple cross-platform app using MVVM

3 ■ MVVM—the model-view–view model design pattern

4 ■ Hello again, MVVM—understanding and enhancing our simple MVVM app

5 ■ What are we (a)waiting for? An introduction to multithreading for Xamarin apps

PART2 BUILDING APPS

6 ■ Designing MVVM cross-platform apps

7 ■ Building cross-platform models

8 ■ Building cross-platform view models

9 ■ Building simple Android views

10 ■ Building more advanced Android views

11 ■ Building simple iOS views

12 ■ Building more advanced iOS views

PART3 FROM WORKING CODE TO THE STORE

13 ■ Running mobile apps on physical devices

14 ■ Testing mobile apps using Xamarin UITest

15 ■ Using App Center to build, test, and monitor apps

16 ■ Deploying apps to beta testers and the stores

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.