Custom renderers
One of the paramount features of the Xamarin.Forms toolkit is the layer of abstraction it provides over UI implementation. With a single API, Xamarin.Forms allows you to use native UI controls and functionality.
For example, the Entry
class at runtime will display a UITextField
view on iOS, an EditText
widget on Android, and a TextBox
control on Windows. The toolkit does this using a concept called renderers. The renderers correspond with the visual elements—controls, pages, and layouts—within the API. So, for example, there is an EntryRenderer
that is responsible for rendering instances of the Entry
class down to the platform-specific versions of that control.
The beauty of this renderer concept is that you can subclass the various renderer classes to override how a specific element is translated at runtime. So, for example, if you want all text boxes in your app (that is, every time you display an Entry
element) to be completely borderless, you...