Xamarin.Forms Projects

Build multiplatform mobile apps and a game from scratch using C# and Visual Studio 2019, 2nd Edition

Daniel Hindrikes, Johan Karlsson

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781839214745
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Microsoft Programming
• Index: Computer Science

Learn to build cross-platform mobile apps using the latest features in Xamarin.Forms 4 with the help of a series of projects including apps for real-time chatting, AR games, location-tracking, weather, photo galleries, and much more

Key Features

• Develop mobile apps, AR games, and chatbots of varying complexity with the help of real-world examples
• Explore the important features of Xamarin.Forms 4 such as Shell, CollectionView, and CarouselView
• Get to grips with advanced concepts such as AR and VR and machine learning for mobile development

Book Description

Xamarin.Forms is a lightweight cross-platform development toolkit for building apps with a rich user interface. Improved and updated to cover the latest features of Xamarin.Forms, this second edition covers CollectionView and Shell, along with interesting concepts such as augmented reality (AR) and machine learning.

Starting with an introduction to Xamarin and how it works, this book shares tips for choosing the type of development environment you should strive for when planning cross-platform mobile apps. You'll build your first Xamarin.Forms app and learn how to use Shell to implement the app architecture. The book gradually increases the level of complexity of the projects, guiding you through creating apps ranging from a location tracker and weather map to an AR game and face recognition. As you advance, the book will take you through modern mobile development frameworks such as SQLite, .NET Core Mono, ARKit, and ARCore. You'll be able to customize your apps for both Android and iOS platforms to achieve native-like performance and speed. The book is filled with engaging examples, so you can grasp essential concepts by writing code instead of reading through endless theory.

By the end of this book, you'll be ready to develop your own native apps with Xamarin.Forms and its associated technologies, such as.NET Core, Visual Studio 2019, and C#.

What you will learn

• Set up Xamarin.Forms to build native apps with code-sharing capabilities
• Understand the core aspects of developing a mobile app, such as its layout, UX, and rendering
• Use custom renderers to gain platform-specific access
• Discover how to create custom layouts for your apps with Xamarin.Forms Shell
• Use Azure SignalR to implement serverless services in your Xamarin apps
• Create an augmented reality (AR) game for Android and iOS using ARCore and ARKit, respectively
• Build and train machine learning models using CoreML, TensorFlow, and Azure Cognitive Services

Who this book is for

This book is for C# and.NET developers who want to learn Xamarin.Forms and get started with native Xamarin mobile application development from the ground up. Working knowledge of Visual Studio will help you to get the most out of this book.

Building a Weather App for Multiple Form Factors

Xamarin.Forms isn't just for creating apps for phones; it can also be used to create apps for tablets and desktop computers. In this chapter, we will build an app that will work on all of these platforms. As well as using three different form factors, we are also going to be working on three different operating systems: iOS, Android, and Windows.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• How to use FlexLayout in Xamarin.Forms
• How to use VisualStateManager
• How to use different views for different form factors
• How to use behaviors

Let's get started!

Technical requirements

To work on this project, we need to have Visual Studio for Mac or PC installed, as well as the Xamarin components. See Chapter 1, Introduction to Xamarin, for more details on how to set up your environment. To build an iOS app using Visual Studio for PC, you have to have a Mac connected. If you don't have access to a Mac at all, you can choose to just work on the Windows and Android parts of this project. Similarly, if you only have Windows, you can choose to work on only the iOS and Android parts of this project.

Project overview

Applications for iOS and Android can run on both phones and tablets. Often, apps are just optimized for phones. In this chapter, we will build an app that will work on different form factors, but we aren't going to stick to just phones and tablets – we are going to target desktop computers as well. The desktop version will be for the Universal Windows Platform (UWP).

The app that we are going to build is a weather app that displays the weather forecast based on the location of the user.

Building the weather app

It's time to start building the app. Create a new blank Xamarin.Forms app using .NET Standard as the Code Sharing Strategy and select iOS, Android, and Windows (UWP) as the platforms. We will name the project Weather.

As the data source for this app, we will use an external weather API. This project will use OpenWeatherMap, a service that offers a couple of free APIs. You can find this service at https://openweathermap.org/api. We will use the 5 day / 3 hour forecast service in this project, which provides a 5-day forecast in...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright and Credits
• Dedication
• About Packt
• Foreword
• Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction to Xamarin
• Building Our First Xamarin.Forms App
• Building a News App Using Xamarin.Forms Shell
• A Matchmaking App with a Rich UX Using Animations
• Building a Photo Gallery App Using CollectionView and CarouselView
• Building a Location Tracking App Using GPS and Maps
• Building a Weather App for Multiple Form Factors
• Setting Up a Backend for a Chat App Using Azure Services
• Building a Real-Time Chat Application
• Creating an Augmented Reality Game
• Hot Dog or Not Hot Dog Using Machine Learning
• Other Books You May Enjoy