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Xamarin.Forms Projects
Xamarin.Forms Projects

Xamarin.Forms Projects: Build seven real-world cross-platform mobile apps with C# and Xamarin.Forms

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Xamarin.Forms Projects

Introduction to Xamarin

This chapter is all about getting to know what Xamarin is and what to expect from it. It is the only chapter that is a pure theory chapter; all the others will cover hands-on projects. You're not expected to write any code at this point, but instead, simply read through the chapter to develop a high-level understanding of what Xamarin is and how Xamarin.Forms are related to Xamarin.

We will start by defining what a native application is and what .NET as a technology brings to the table. After that, we will look at how Xamarin.Forms fit into the bigger picture and

learn when it is appropriate to use traditional Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms. We often use the term traditional Xamarin to describe applications that don't use Xamarin.Forms, even though Xamarin.Forms applications are bootstrapped through a traditional Xamarin application.

In this chapter, we will be covering the following topics:

  • Native applications
  • Xamarin and Mono
  • Xamarin.Forms
  • Setting up a development machine

Let's get started!

Native applications

The term native application means different things to different people. For some people, it is an application that is developed using the tools specified by the creator of the platform, such as an application developed for iOS with Objective-C or Swift, an Android app developed with Java or Kotlin, or a Windows app developed with .NET. Other people use the term native application to refer to applications that are compiled to machine code that is native. In this book, we will define a native application as one that has a native user interface, performance, and API access. The following list explains these three concepts in greater detail:

  • Native user interface: Applications built with Xamarin use the standard controls for each platform. This means, for example, that an iOS app built with Xamarin will look and behave as an iOS user would expect, and an Android app built with Xamarin will look and behave as an Android user would expect.
  • Native performance: Applications built with Xamarin are compiled for native performance and could use platform-specific hardware acceleration.
  • Native API access: Native API access means that applications built with Xamarin could use everything that the target platforms and devices offer to developers.

Xamarin and Mono

Xamarin is a developer platform that is used for developing native applications for iOS (Xamarin.iOS), Android (Xamarin.Android), and macOS (Xamarin.Mac). It is technically a binding layer on top of these platforms. Binding to platform APIs enables .NET developers to use C# (and F#) to develop native applications with the full capacity of each platform. The C# APIs we use when we develop applications with Xamarin are more or less identical to the platform APIs, but they are .NETified. For example, APIs are often customized to follow .NET naming conventions, and Android set and get methods are often replaced by properties. The reason for this is that APIs should be easier to use for .NET developers.

Mono (https://www.mono-project.com) is an open source implementation of the Microsoft .NET framework, which is based on the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) standards for C# and the common language runtime (CLR). Mono was created to bring the .NET framework to platforms other than Windows. It is part of the .NET foundation (http://www.dotnetfoundation.org), an independent organization that supports open development and collaboration involving the .NET ecosystem.

With the combination of Xamarin platforms and Mono, we will be able to use both all platform-specific APIs and all platform-independent parts of .NET, including, for example, namespaces, systems, System.Linq, System.IO, System.Net, and System.Threading.Tasks.

There are several reasons to use Xamarin for mobile application development, as we will see in the following sections.

Code sharing

If there is one common programming language for multiple mobile platforms, and even server platforms, then we can share a lot of code between our target platforms, as illustrated in the following diagram. All code that isn't related to the target platform can be shared with other .NET platforms. Code that is typically shared in this way includes business logic, network calls, and data models:

There is also a large community based around the .NET platforms and a wide range of third-party libraries and components that can be downloaded from NuGet (https://nuget.org) and used across the .NET platforms.

Code sharing across platforms will lead to shorter development times. It will also lead to applications of a higher quality because we only need to write the code for business logic once. There will be a lower risk of bugs, and we will also be able to guarantee that a calculation will return the same result, no matter what platform our users are using.

Using existing knowledge

For .NET developers who want to start building native mobile applications, it is easier to just learn the APIs for the new platforms than it is to learn programming languages and APIs for both old and new platforms.

Similarly, organizations that want to build native mobile applications could use their existing developers with their knowledge of .NET to develop applications. Because there are more .NET developers than Objective-C and Swift developers, it would be easier to find new developers for mobile application development projects.

Xamarin.iOS

Xamarin.iOS is used for building applications for iOS with .NET, and contains the bindings to the iOS APIs mentioned previously. Xamarin.iOS uses ahead of time (AOT) compiling to compile the C# code to Advanced RISC Machines (ARM) assembly language. The Mono runtime runs along with the Objective-C runtime. Code that uses .NET namespaces, such as System.Linq or System.Net, will be executed by the Mono runtime, while code that uses iOS-specific namespaces will be executed by the Objective-C runtime. Both the Mono runtime and the Objective-C runtime will run on top of the Unix-like kernel, X is Not Unix (XNU) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU), which is developed by Apple. The following diagram shows an overview of the iOS architecture:

Xamarin.Android

Xamarin.Android is used to build applications for Android with .NET, and contains the bindings to the Android APIs. The Mono runtime and the Android runtime run side by side on top of a Linux kernel. Xamarin.Android applications could either be just-in-time (JIT)-compiled or AOT-compiled, but to AOT-compile them, you need to use Visual Studio Enterprise.

Communication between the Mono runtime and the Android runtime occurs via a Java Native Interface (JNI) bridge. There are two types of JNI bridges: manage callable wrapper (MCW) and Android callable wrapper (ACW). An MCW is used when the code needs to run in the Android runtime (ART) and an ACW is used when ART needs to run code in the Mono runtime, as shown in the following diagram:

Xamarin.Mac

Xamarin.Mac is for building applications for macOS with .NET, and contains the bindings to the macOS APIs. Xamarin.Mac has the same architecture as Xamarin.iOS—the only difference is that Xamarin.Mac applications are JIT compiled, unlike Xamarin.iOS apps, which are AOT-compiled. This is shown in the following diagram:

Xamarin.Forms

Xamarin.Forms is a UI framework that is built on top of Xamarin (for iOS and Android) and the Universal Windows Platform (UWP). Xamarin.Forms enables developers to create a UI for iOS, Android, and UWP with one shared code base, as illustrated in the following diagram. If we are building an application with Xamarin.Forms, we can use XAML, C#, or a combination of both to create the UI:

The architecture of Xamarin.Forms

Xamarin.Forms is more or less just an abstract layer on top of each platform. Xamarin.Forms has a shared layer, which is used by all platforms, as well as a platform-specific layer. The platform-specific layer contains renderers. A renderer is a class that maps a Xamarin.Forms control into a platform-specific native control. Each Xamarin.Forms control has a platform-specific renderer.

The following diagram illustrates how an entry control in Xamarin.Forms is rendered to a UITextField control from the UIKit namespace when the shared Xamarin.Forms code is used in an iOS app. The same code in Android renders an EditText control from the Android.Widget namespace:

Defining a user interface using XAML

The most common way to declare your user interface in Xamarin.Forms is by defining it in a XAML document. It is also possible to create the GUI in C#, since XAML is really only a markup language for instantiating objects. You could, in theory, use XAML to create any type of object, as long as it has a parameterless constructor. A XAML document is an Extensible Markup Language (XML) document with a specific schema.

Defining a Label control

As a simple example, let's look at the following snippet of XAML:

<Label Text="Hello World!" />

When the XAML parser encounters this snippet, it will create an instance of a Label object and then set the properties of the object that correspond to the attributes in the XAML. This means that if we set a Text property in XAML, it will set the Text property on the instance of the Label object that is created. The XAML in the preceding example will have the same effect as the following:

var obj = new Label()
{
Text = "Hello World!"
};

XAML exists to make it easier to view the object hierarchy that you need to create in order to make a GUI. An object model for a GUI is also hierarchical by design, so XAML has support for adding child objects. You can simply add them as child nodes, as follows:

<StackLayout>
<Label Text="Hello World" />
<Entry Text="Ducks are us" />
</StackLayout>

The StackLayout is a container control that will organize the children vertically or horizontally within that container. A vertical organization is the default value, and will be used unless you specify otherwise. There are also a number of other containers, such as the Grid and the FlexLayout. These will be used in many of the projects in the following chapters.

Creating a page in XAML

A single control is no good unless it has a container that hosts it. Let's see what an entire page would look like. A fully valid ContentPage defined in XAML is an XML document. This means that we must start with an XML declaration. After that, we must have one, and only one, root node, as shown in the following code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<ContentPage
xmlns="http://xamarin.com/schemas/2014/forms"
xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2009/xaml"
x:Class="MyApp.MainPage">

<StackLayout>
<Label Text="Hello world!" />
</StackLayout>
</ContentPage>

In the preceding example, we have defined a ContentPage that translates into a single view on each platform. In order to make it valid XAML, you must specify a default namespace (xmlns="http://xamarin.com/schemas/2014/forms") and then add the x namespace (xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2009/xaml").

The default namespace lets you create objects without prefixing them, like the StackLayout object. The x namespace lets you access properties such as the x:Class, which tells the XAML parser which class to instantiate to control the page when the ContentPage object is being created.

A ContentPage can have only one child. In this case, it's a StackLayout control. Unless you specify otherwise, the default layout orientation is vertical. A StackLayout can, therefore, have multiple children. Later on, we will touch on more advanced layout controls, such as the Grid and the FlexLayout control.

In this specific example, we are going to create a Label control as the first child of the StackLayout.

Creating a page in C#

For clarity, the following code shows how the same thing would look in C#:

public class MainPage : ContentPage
{
}

A page is a class that inherits from the Xamarin.Forms.ContentPage. This class is autogenerated for you if you create a XAML page, but if you go code-only, then you will need to define it yourself.

Let's create the same control hierarchy as the XAML page we defined earlier using the following code:

var page = new MainPage();

var stacklayout = new StackLayout();
stacklayout.Children.Add(
new Label()
{
Text = "Welcome to Xamarin.Forms"
});

page.Content = stacklayout;

The first statement creates a page. You could, in theory, create a new page directly of the ContentPage type, but this would prohibit you from writing any code behind it. For this reason, it's a good practice to subclass each page that you are planning to create.

The block following this first statement creates the StackLayout control that contains the Label control that is added to the Children collection.

Finally, we need to assign the StackLayout to the Content property of the page.

XAML or C#?

Generally, using XAML will give you a much better overview, since the page is a hierarchical structure of objects and XAML is a very nice way of defining that structure. In code, the structure gets flipped around since you must define the innermost object first, making it harder to read the structure of your page. This was shown in an earlier example in this chapter. Having said that, it is generally a matter of preference as to how you decide to define the GUI. This book will use XAML rather than C# in the projects to come.

Xamarin.Forms versus traditional Xamarin

While this book is about Xamarin.Forms, we will highlight the difference between using traditional Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms. Traditional Xamarin is used when developing applications that use iOS and Android SDK without any means of abstraction. For example, we can create an iOS app that defines its user interface in a storyboard or in the code directly. This code will not be reusable for other platforms, such as Android. Applications built using this approach can still share non-platform-specific code by simply referencing a .NET standard library. This relationship is shown in the following diagram:

Xamarin.Forms, on the other hand, is an abstraction of the GUI, which allows us to define user interfaces in a platform-agnostic way. It still builds on top of Xamarin.iOS, Xamarin.Android, and all other supported platforms. The Xamarin.Forms application can be created as a .NET standard library or as a shared code project, where the source files are linked as copies and built within the same project as the platform you are currently building for. This relationship is shown in the following diagram:

Having said that, Xamarin.Forms cannot exist without traditional Xamarin, since it's bootstrapped through an application for each platform. This gives you the ability to extend Xamarin.Forms on each platform using custom renderers and platform-specific code that can be exposed to your shared code base through interfaces. We'll look at these concepts in detail later in this chapter.

When to use Xamarin.Forms

We can use Xamarin.Forms in most cases and for most types of applications. If we need to use controls that not are available in Xamarin.Forms, we can always use the platform-specific APIs. There are, however, cases where Xamarin.Forms is not useful. The most common situation in which we might want to avoid using Xamarin.Forms is if we are building an app that we want to look very different across our target platforms.

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Key benefits

  • Explore SQLite through Xamarin to store locations for various location-based applications
  • Make a real-time serverless chat service by using Azure SignalR service
  • Build Augmented Reality application with the power of UrhoSharp together with ARKit and ARCore

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.

Who is this book 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.

What you will learn

  • Set up a machine for Xamarin development
  • Get to know about MVVM and data bindings in Xamarin.Forms
  • Understand how to use custom renderers to gain platform-specific access
  • Discover Geolocation services through Xamarin Essentials
  • Create an abstraction of ARKit and ARCore to expose as a single API for the game
  • Learn how to train a model for image
  • classification with Azure Cognitive Services
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Table of Contents

10 Chapters
Introduction to Xamarin Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Building Our First Xamarin.Forms App Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
A Matchmaking App with a Rich UX Using Animations Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Building a Location Tracking App Using GPS and Maps Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Building a Weather App for Multiple Form Factors Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Setting up a Backend for a Chat App Using Azure Services Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Building a Real-Time Chat Application Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Creating an Augmented-Reality Game Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Hot Dog or Not Hot Dog Using Machine Learning Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Other Books You May Enjoy Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon 4.4
(5 Ratings)
5 star 80%
4 star 0%
3 star 0%
2 star 20%
1 star 0%
J. Dodge Feb 01, 2020
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
I've been a Software Developer for years. Started out with Ada in college and have been involved in projects using C++ (both VC++ on the desktop and VxWorks on the embedded side), C#, Angular, etc. Having only scratched the surface with mobile development in my free time (literally, a few hello world examples for Android), when it came time to start working on a mobile project for work, I decided I needed a book. Knowing that management had already chosen Xamarin, I took a gamble on this book since it only had 3 reviews (at the time I purchased).I personally loved this book. I might be a little biased because I was so excited to start working on some mobile projects for work, but all in all, this book completely met my expectations. I'll admit, I only got through 5 and 1/2 of the projects in this book, because it came time to start working "for real" at work :-)However, I've had to go back at least twice now and reference how something was done. So not only did this book give me the confidence to dive right in at work, it's still coming in handy a month later.
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Unhappy Jul 22, 2021
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
The source codes work! and quite practical
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Rich and Sandra Sherwood Jul 29, 2020
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
It's just what I need for my app developing
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mdl Jun 09, 2019
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Really great content. I enjoyed the projects and found the instructions easy to follow. Would recommend to any Xamarin developer looking to try building new types of apps.
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Krish Krithivasan Aug 16, 2019
Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 2
The projects covered are too simplistic. Difficult to extend to the real world.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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Delivery time is up to 15 business days for remote areas of WA, NT & QLD.

Premium: Delivery to addresses in Australia only
Trackable delivery to most P. O. Boxes and private residences in Australia within 4-5 days based on the distance to a destination following dispatch.

India:

Premium: Delivery to most Indian addresses within 5-6 business days

Rest of the World:

Premium: Countries in the American continent: Trackable delivery to most countries within 4-7 business days

Asia:

Premium: Delivery to most Asian addresses within 5-9 business days

Disclaimer:
All orders received before 5 PM U.K time would start printing from the next business day. So the estimated delivery times start from the next day as well. Orders received after 5 PM U.K time (in our internal systems) on a business day or anytime on the weekend will begin printing the second to next business day. For example, an order placed at 11 AM today will begin printing tomorrow, whereas an order placed at 9 PM tonight will begin printing the day after tomorrow.


Unfortunately, due to several restrictions, we are unable to ship to the following countries:

  1. Afghanistan
  2. American Samoa
  3. Belarus
  4. Brunei Darussalam
  5. Central African Republic
  6. The Democratic Republic of Congo
  7. Eritrea
  8. Guinea-bissau
  9. Iran
  10. Lebanon
  11. Libiya Arab Jamahriya
  12. Somalia
  13. Sudan
  14. Russian Federation
  15. Syrian Arab Republic
  16. Ukraine
  17. Venezuela