Creating Mobile Apps with Xamarin.Forms, Preview Edition

by Charles Petzold

Written by programming legend Charles Petzold and created jointly by Microsoft Press and Xamarin Inc., this Preview Edition ebook is about writing applications for Xamarin.Forms, the new mobile development platform for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone unveiled by Xamarin in May 2014. Xamarin.Forms lets you write shared user-interface code in C# and XAML (the eXtensible Application Markup Language) that maps to native controls on these three platforms. (The final edition of this ebook will be published in the spring of 2015.) This ebook is for C# programmers who want to write applications for the three most popular mobile platforms--iOS, Android, and Windows Phone--with a single code base. Xamarin.Forms also has applicability for those programmers who want eventually to use C# and the Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android libraries to target the native application programming interfaces (APIs) of these platforms. Xamarin.Forms can be a big help in getting started with these platforms or in constructing a prototype or proof-of-concept application. This ebook assumes that you know C# and have some familiarity with the use of the .NET Framework. However, when it describes some C# and .NET features that might be somewhat new to recent C# programmers, the ebook adopts a somewhat slower pace. In particular, the introduction of the async keyword and await operator in Chapter 3 follows a discussion that shows how to do asynchronous programming using traditional callback methods.

Genres: Computers, Technology, Software, Reference, Unfinished

272 pages, ebook

First published September 26, 2014

About the author

Charles Petzold has been writing about programming for Windows-based operating systems for 24 years. A Microsoft MVP for Client Application Development and a Windows Pioneer Award winner, Petzold is author of the classic Programming Windows, currently in its sixth edition and one of the best-known programming books of all time; the widely acclaimed Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software; and more than a dozen other books.

Reviews

[Mannus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some parts are good but some not that good. It gave me a good head start at least for developing xamarin.forms applications

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a partial preview of a forthcoming book about using Xamarin forms for cross-platform mobile application development. By the time I got to the end of the book, I could read the code (both XAML and C#) and figure out what the apps were doing. I didn't actually experiment with the tutorials, so I was not confident that I could develop on this platform off the top of my head. I do, however, plan to go back through the tutorials to try and build up my capacity for this. I have several ideas for apps. Worth reading if you have any interest in mobile app development.