Level: Introductory to Intermediate
Mobile development is a white-hot area of software development. Everyone wants to target the mobile market and get their app in the hands of millions of customers. But the splintered landscape of mobile platforms quickly eliminates the enthusiasm for creating apps that span all mobile platforms.
Xamarin is a popular cross-platform toolkit aimed directly at the .NET developer. It provides a way to write project code in C# and produce an app that runs on Android, iOS and Windows devices. In the early days of Xamarin the focus was on building a shared code base that works across the various platforms. Instead of writing code in Java, Objective-C and C# a developer can write the majority of the app code in C#. That was a tremendous step forward, but it never addressed the UI dilemma. Each platform has a different set of UI elements and a distinct markup language. Because of this fact it was difficult to create a shared cross platform UI in a Xamarin project; you were forced to create three separate presentation layers.
Xamarin.Forms offers a solution to this dilemma. Instead of defining a UI in a set of XAML, AndroidXML and iOs Xib/Storyboard files it uses XAML as the common markup language. Plus it provides a set of UI controls that are simple to use within your XAML. When the app is compiled to native code, the Xamarin.Forms controls are turned into the native UI elements necessary for each mobile platform. Attend this session to learn the fundamentals of Xamarin.Forms.
You will learn:
- About building a cross platform UI
- How to work-around platform idiosyncrasies
- About the built-in controls
- How to work with layouts