Xamarin Mobile Application Development Tutorial

You write your UI code for each specific platform-one for Android and one for an iOS device. Then write business logic that can be reused on both platforms. Xamarin’s approach is to let developers create UIs that are unique to each platform, and then create components that can be reused easily on another platform, using the C# programming language.

On the contrary, it encourages developers to take advantage of the features that each platform offers. The AppShell.xaml houses the Shell of our application structure. It includes styles and colors for our app shell, and then has additional items for tabs, flyouts, and pages that are displayed. Here we will find two FlyoutItem elements that represent the AboutPage and the BrowsePage.

#2. Xamarin: Build Native Cross-Platform Apps

This is a recipe that will be repeated over and over again for the code-behind when you are using a XAML-based project with MVVM. We initialize the UI, then bind all the bindings to a new instantiation of the view model. We will be adding to these interfaces in future chapters as we add more capabilities to the application. Instabug empowers mobile teams to maintain industry-leading apps with mobile-focused, user-centric stability and performance monitoring.

The http endpoint redirects to https and the standard HttpClient does not handle redirects. This produces another deployment step that creates a SQL database with your settings and binds it to the App Service. Once complete, the connection MS_TableConnectionString will be listed in Data Connections blade.

Four Xamarin Editions

We won’t be doing any styling work in the demonstration apps that we write during the course of this book. It’s tempting to call the client version of the class the same as the server version. If we did that, the models on both the client and server would look the same. They are missing the Deleted flag https://wizardsdev.com/en/news/new-mobile-course/ and they do not contain any relationship information on the client. I choose to deliberately call the base class something else on the client to avoid this confusion. As we will learn when we deal with table data, these fields need to be defined with the same name and semantics as on the server.

It’s a great option for multiplatform mobile app development with a single code base to speed up the app-building process while keeping as much of each platform’s native features as possible. Unless you have been hiding in a cave for the past few months, you have heard of a company called Xamarin. In 2013, Xamarin announced Xamarin Studio, a tool that allows developers to build mobile applications using the C# language. In addition, Xamarin announced its integration with Microsoft’s Visual Studio, allowing developers to continue using their favorite development environment to build mobile apps. It is a framework to develop a cross platform mobile application using C#. There are various frameworks which offer the cross platform app development.

Become An Expert: Backend Projects That Define Senior Developers

Doing so allows the UI to react to changes in the items. When it is finished, you should notice that there are several projects in your solution. One for each of the platforms we will target with our application. Web and mobile application for control of the temperature inside the building saving the maximum possible energy. This does not mean that all those who used Xamarin need to completely rewrite their code. These are a few ways to reduce the size of large applications.

If Visual Studio hasn’t done so already, the missing NuGet packages for Azure Mobile Apps will be downloaded. If there are, check the typing for any changes you made. There is another method in the App_Start\Startup.MobileApp.cs file for seeding data into the database for us. We can leave that alone for now, but remember it is there in case you need to seed data into a new database for your own backend.

Platforms Supported by Xamarin

One last thing to note, Xamarin could be used to build another type of app which is called Universal App, UWP (a Windows 10 app). Select a device that is appropriate for your display, e.g., Nexus 4” display. It is always advisable to test on a minimum target platform, e.g., API 10 Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) so as to ensure your App works across all Android platforms.

• Xamarin.Forms projects should be upgraded to .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI).
• Since we already did this earlier in the post, we will skip them and select Next.
• Telemedicine application that allows getting affordable, real-time health advice from medical experts round-a-clock using internet connection.
• Using C#, programmers can benefit from the .NET platform, which handles a variety of common tasks like memory allocation, garbage collection, and compatibility with underlying platforms.

In this section, we will modify our project and create a button which will display text upon click. After our textview that we created, we will add a button as shown below. On the solution, open Resources → layout → Main.axml file. Switch from Design View and go to the Source file and type the following lines of code to build your app. If you have got through the entire process outlined in this Chapter and built the application for each platform, then congratulations. You are really integrating the build systems across Visual Studio, Android, Xamarin, and XCode.

In addition, there is no indication of network activity – this manifests as a significant delay between the TaskList page appearing and the data appearing in the list. We will rely on interfaces for defining the shape for the class for any service that we interact with. This is really not important in small projects like this one. This technique allows us to mock the backend service, as we shall see later on.

Later on, multiple companies acquired Mono and laid off original developers. You can develop native apps with shared business logic using Xamarin for free. Just like in the iPhone project, you create an instance of the MyClass class and then proceed to call its USDtoEURRate() method. The only difference is that in Android, you use the RunOnUiThread() method to display the Toast window in the main UI thread. Run the application on the AVD and you can see the exchange rate after a while (see Figure 28).