Building the chat app

It's time to start building the app. We recommend that you use the same solution we used in Chapter 8, Setting Up a Backend for a Chat App Using Azure Services, because this will make code sharing easier. In that solution, we created a Mobile App (Xamarin.Forms) called Chat:

Select the Blank template and iOS and Android as the platforms. Now that we have created the project, we will update all NuGet packages to the latest versions because the project templates are not updated as often as the packages that are used inside the templates are:

Creating the chat service

The first thing we will do is create a chat service that will be used by both the iOS and Android applications. To make the code more testable and to make it easier to replace the chat service if we want to use another provider in the future, we need to perform the following steps:

1. In the Chat project, add a reference to the Chat.Messages project.
2. Create a new folder in the Chat project called...