Xamarin Cross-platform Application Development

Develop production-ready applications for iOS and Android using Xamarin

About This Book

• Write native iOS and Android applications with Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android respectively
• Learn strategies that allow you to share code between iOS and Android
• Design user interfaces that can be shared across Android, iOS, and Windows Phone using Xamarin.Forms

Who This Book Is For

If you are a developer with experience in C# and are just getting into mobile development, this is the book for you. If you have experience with desktop applications or the Web, this book will give you a head start on cross-platform development.

What You Will Learn

• Learn Apple's MVC design pattern
• Understand the Android activity lifecycle
• Share C# code across platforms and call native Objective-C or Java libraries from C#
• Get to grips with unit testing for mobile applications
• Implement a web service with Azure Mobile Services
• Deploy and debug your application on mobile devices
• Submit your app to the Apple App Store and Google Play

In Detail

Developing a mobile application for just one platform is becoming a thing of the past. Companies expect their apps to be supported on both iOS and Android, while leveraging the best native features on both. Xamarin's tools help ease this problem by giving developers a single toolset to target both platforms.

This book is a step-by-step guide to building real-world applications for iOS and Android. The book walks you through building a chat application, complete with a backend web service and native features such as GPS location, camera, and push notifications. Additionally, you'll learn how to use external libraries with Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms to create shared user interfaces and make app-store-ready applications. This second edition has been updated with new screenshots and detailed steps to provide you with a holistic overview of the new features incorporated in Xamarin 3. By the end of the book, you will have gained expertise to build on the concepts learned and effectively develop a market-ready cross-platform application.

Jonathan Peppers

Jonathan Peppers is a Xamarin MVP and the lead developer of the popular apps and games at Hitcents, such as Hanx Writer and Draw a Stickman: EPIC. He has been working with the C# programming language for over 8 years. He is also quite familiar with other technologies, such as WinForms, WPF, Unity, ASP.Net WebForms, ASP.Net MVC, and Windows Azure. In recent years, Hitcents has been heavily investing in mobile development with Xamarin and has developed over 50 mobile applications with Xamarin across multiple platforms.