Xamarin Forms: Build Native Mobile Apps with C#

When you click the debug button if you don’t have any emulators you will be asked to created one. IOS & Android projects are the “head” or “parent” project that is used to house platform specific code, settings, assets, and more. At some point you will need to go into these project and tweak things around, but for now we will stay in the cross-platform project. It is the foundation that enables code to be run on different platforms such as iOS, Android, and Windows. If you are a web developer this is like the V8 runtime that executes JavaScript or if you are a Java developer, the JVM that executes Java.

• I should build successfully if everything on your Mac is setup correctly.
• Once I have the functionality working, I work on the styling of the page.
• The ShellContent has a binding to our page that we created and automatically the pages will appear and navigate to each of them when selected.
• So, you don’t need to be near your Mac to do the debugging.
• As PerformAuthorizationRequest is synchronous and returns void, the code awaits upon the taskCompletionSource member, knowing it will only ever be set once a response has been retrieved.
• Run the simulator using the normal Visual Studio method.
• In this article, I provide an introduction to Xamarin and its appeal to developers who are building cross-platform mobile apps.

There are some key data points we need to collect when our users log new entries with the app, such as title, location, date, rating, and notes. For now, we will use a regular EntryCell element for each of these fields. We will update, customize, and add things to these fields later in this book.

Getting started with Xamarin.Forms

Become a successful cross-platform app developer by taking this Udemy course. This is the perfect app development course for anyone who wants to start development from scratch with a less explored development platform, that is Xamarin. In the same year, Microsoft released the Xamarin SDK as an open-source app development platform that uses the .NET framework and C# for coding. The SDK will become available on all versions of Visual Studio IDE.

The Xamarin tools use SSH to connect to the Mac, which must be configured to build iOS apps from Visual Studio. With portable class libraries, the code is compiled separately and referenced in each project like any normal class library. The big difference here is that you have access to a subset of .NET that is compatible with all the target platforms. So, for example, you could use System.Net.Http, but trying to access hardware, such as, the camera API is not available. You could, however, use a generalized interface that uses dependency injection.

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Xamarin.Forms is a user interface framework for writing a common code base for Windows, iOS, and Android applications. It’s often called an extended version of Xamarin.Native, which helps developers implement cross-platform Xamarin mobile application development from a single common codebase. Applications are developed using Xamarin.Forms inherit all the features of Xamarin.

This option is not normally available through other SQL database creation flows. We could link an existing database if we had one defined. The EntityData class adds five additional properties to the class – we’ll discuss those in more details during the Data Access and Offline Sync chapter. At this point, Visual Studio will create your backend project. Are you feeling stuck or overwhelmed in your coding journey?

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Xamarin’s approach is to let developers create UI that are unique to each platform, and then create components that can be reused easily on another platform. You can use the little arrow drop down to see the .xaml.cs code behind file. The first project contains several folders, code files, and user interface files.

That too on a familiar software development IDE Visual Studio. Now that the class library is built, it is time to test it on both the iPhone and Android projects to see if Xamarin really lives up to its promises. Open up the HelloiPhone project that you have created earlier and double-click on the References item in the solution (see Figure 26). Under the .Net Assembly tab, navigate to the ~/Projects/WebServiceAccess/WebServiceAccess/bin/Debug/ folder and double-click on the WebServiceAccess.dll and then click OK. This adds the class library to the project so that you can use it for accessing the currency convertor Web service.

History of Xamarin

The best way to do this is to use the Xamarin Unified Installer, which will install everything you need. Xamarin uses a shared C#/.NET codebase along with either Xamarin Studio or Visual Studio, to write native Android, iOS, and Windows Apps. The new entry page of the app will give the user a way to add a new log entry by presenting a series of fields to collect the log entry details.

In a recent post to software decision makers, I discussed reasons businesses should consider cross-platform native development over website development. After successfully installing Xamarin as described in the first example, it’s time to launch the first sample application. Stay tuned for our next post to learn about adding MVVM pattern and data binding to this Travel app. https://wizardsdev.com/en/news/new-mobile-course/ We built a simple three-page app with static data, leveraging the most basic concepts of the Xamarin.Forms toolkit. We used the default Xamarin.Forms navigation APIs to move between the three pages. The detail page will take an instance of a TripLogEntry model as a constructor parameter, which we will use in the rest of the page to display the entry details to the user.

It isn’t important now, but we will want this technique repeatedly as our UI actions kick off network activity. We’ve already seen the Title property – this is a text field that specifies the title of the page. When the button is tapped, the login command will be run. It’s important to note here that the Azure Mobile Apps Client SDK does a lot of the work for us.

Mocking the backend service is a great technique to rapidly iterate on the front end mobile client without getting tied into what the backend is doing. The application we are going to build together is a simple task list. The mobile client will have three screens – an entry screen, a task list and a task details page. It is nice to be able to debug on your Mac, but I must admit, it is kind of a pain at times to be forced to sit by the machine to test your application. Well, a cool new feature for Visual Studio is the Visual Studio iOS Simulator. This add-in for Visual Studio allows us to debug our iOS version of the app right on our computer.