Mastering Xamarin.Forms: App architecture techniques for building multi-platform, native mobile apps with Xamarin.Forms 4, 3rd Edition

New edition of the bestselling guide to building an effective mobile app architecture with Xamarin.Forms 4 that maximizes the overall quality of apps.

Key Features

• Updated for Xamarin.Forms 4
• Packed with real-world scenarios and solutions to help you build professional grade mobile apps with Xamarin.Forms
• Includes design patterns and best practice techniques that every mobile developer should know

Book Description

Discover how to extend and build upon the components of the most recent version of Xamarin.Forms to develop an effective, robust mobile app architecture. This new edition features Xamarin.Forms 4 updates, including CollectionView and RefreshView, new coverage of client-side validation, and updates on how to implement user authentication.

Mastering Xamarin.Forms, Third Edition is one of the few Xamarin books structured around the development of a simple app from start to finish, beginning with a basic Xamarin.Forms app and going step by step through several advanced topics to create a solution architecture rich with the benefits of good design patterns and best practices.

This book introduces a core separation between the app's user interface and the app's business logic by applying the MVVM pattern and data binding, and then focuses on building a layer of plugin-like services that handle platform-specific utilities such as navigation and geo-location, as well as how to loosely use these services in the app with inversion of control and dependency injection. You'll connect the app to a live web-based API and set up offline synchronization before testing the app logic through unit testing. Finally, you will learn how to add monitoring to your Xamarin.Forms projects to track crashes and analytics and gain a proactive edge on quality.

What you will learn

• Find out how, when, and why to use architecture patterns and best practices with Xamarin.Forms
• Implement the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern and data binding in Xamarin.Forms mobile apps
• Incorporate client-side validation in Xamarin.Forms mobile apps
• Extend the Xamarin.Forms navigation API with a custom ViewModel-centric navigation service
• Leverage the inversion of control and dependency injection patterns in Xamarin.Forms mobile apps
• Work with online and offline data in Xamarin.Forms mobile apps
• Use platform-specific APIs to build rich custom user interfaces in Xamarin.Forms mobile apps
• Explore how to monitor mobile app quality using Visual Studio App Center

Who this book is for

This book is intended for .NET developers who are familiar with Xamarin mobile application development and the open source Xamarin.Forms toolkit. If you have already started working with Xamarin.Forms and want to take your app to the next level, making it more maintainable, testable and flexible, then this book is for you.

Table of Contents

1. Getting Started
2. MVVM and Data Binding
3. Navigation
4. Platform-Specific Services and Dependency Injection
5. User Interface
6. API Data Access
7. Authentication
8. Testing
9. App Monitoring

Ed Snider is a senior software developer, speaker, author, and Microsoft MVP based in the Washington D.C./Northern Virginia area. He has a passion for mobile design and development and regularly speaks about Xamarin and Windows app development in the community. Ed works at InfernoRed Technology, where his primary role is working with clients and partners to build mobile products on iOS, Android, and Windows. He's been coding for over half of his life, starting out by working part time in high school updating the local newspaper's website and building web apps for small businesses in his hometown. Ed started working with the .NET in 2005 and has been building mobile apps with .NET since 2011. Ed was recognized as a Xamarin MVP in 2015 and as a Microsoft MVP in 2017.