Who This Book Is For

This book is intended for C# developers who are familiar with the Xamarin platform and the Xamarin.Forms toolkit. If you have already started working with Xamarin.Forms and want to take your app to the next level with higher quality, maintainability, testability, and flexibility, then this book is for you.

What You Will Learn

In Detail

Discover how to extend and build upon the components of the Xamarin.Forms toolkit to develop an effective, robust mobile app architecture. Starting with an app built with the basics of the Xamarin.Forms toolkit, you'll go step by step through several advanced topics to create a solution architecture rich with the benefits of good design patterns and best practices.

You'll start by introducing a core separation between the app's user interface and its business logic by applying the MVVM pattern and data-binding. Then you focus on building out a layer of plugin-like services that handle platform-specific utilities such as navigation and geo-location, and on how to loosely use these services in the app with inversion of control and dependency injection. Next you connect the app to a live web-based API and set up offline synchronization. Then, you delve into testing the app logic through unit tests. Finally, you set up Visual Studio App Center for monitoring usage and bugs to gain a proactive edge on app quality.

Style and approach

This easy-to-follow, code-rich guide will walk you through building a real-world Xamarin.Forms mobile app from start to finish. Each chapter builds on the app by applying new advanced capabilities, design patterns, and best practices. Packed with real-world scenarios, this step-by-step guide will help you quickly build professional-grade apps with Xamarin.Forms.