Receiving NFC events

Sometimes we may wish to make use of NFC, a very short range communication technology, to transfer data or to interact with NFC tags.

Getting ready

To develop for NFC, we need to have a device that includes NFC hardware.

How to do it…

We can query the NfcAdapter instance for the status of the hardware as well as to be notified when a new tag is detected:

1. As with the other hardware features, we need permission to access NFC services:

   [assembly: UsesPermission(Manifest.Permission.Nfc)]

2. Additionally, we need to specify that we are going to be using the NFC device feature. If our app cannot run without NFC, we set the Required property to true:

   [assembly: UsesFeature(
     PackageManager.FeatureNfc, Required = true)]

   However, if our app runs fine on a device without NFC, we set the Required property to false:

   [assembly: UsesFeature(
     PackageManager.FeatureNfc, Required = false)]

3. Now that we have permission, we can get the NfcAdapter instance:

   adapter = NfcAdapter.GetDefaultAdapter(this...