Learn the bare essentials needed to begin developing cross-platform, mobile apps using Xamarin.Forms. Apps can be easily deployed to Google Play or to the Apple App Store. You will gain insight on architecture and how to arrange your app's design, where to begin developing, what pitfalls exist, and how to avoid them. Also covered are expected new features in Xamarin.Forms 3.0, so you may be prepared ahead of time for what the next release brings. Xamarin.Forms Essentials provides a brief history of Xamarin as a company, including how their product has become one of the most-used, cross-platform technologies for enterprise applications and app development across the world. Examples in the book are built around a real-life example that is an actual app in Google Play and in the Apple App Store, and has thousands of downloads between iOS and Android. You will learn how an application is set up from scratch, and you will benefit from the author's hard-won experience and tips in addressing various development challenges. What You'll Learn Create cross-platform user interfaces from one code base for both iOS and Android See how a commercial application is built and then deployed for sale in the app stores Integrate your Xamarin.Forms applications with third-party, RESTful APIs Arrange application architecture to avoid pitfalls and optimize your design Get a heads-up on new features released as part of Xamarin.Forms 3.0 Choose appropriately between Xamarin.Forms and traditional Xamarin, depending upon your application needs and its goals Who This Book Is For Mobile app developers who are producing software for multiple platforms, including Google Android and Apple iOS. Readers should be familiar with Visual Studio either on Mac OS X or Windows, and have a working knowledge of C#.

Use the solutions provided in this book to handle common challenges in Xamarin.Forms that are encountered on a daily basis. Working examples and techniques are presented that you can modify and drop directly into your own projects. You will be able to deliver working code faster than ever. Examples are made available through GitHub, maximizing the convenience and value this book provides to Xamarin.Forms developers. Solutions in the book are organized broadly into problem domains such as user interface for applications, data and security, connectivity and external services, and more. Within each domain the book presents specific solutions addressing challenges that are commonly faced. Under data and security, for example, you'll find specific solutions around storing login credentials, local data caching, and sending authorization tokens in HTTP requests. Not only do the solutions in the book solve specific problems, they also present best practices that can inform and improve the quality of the code that you write. Xamarin.Forms Solutions is chock full of practical advice and code examples that no Xamarin.Forms programmer will want to be without. The basics of Xamarin.Forms are provided for beginning developers. What You'll Learn Know the in-depth basics of Xamarin.Forms and the inner workings Create custom renderers and dependency services Manage the appearance of user interfaces through styling and theming, layout options, rotation, and animation Build sophisticated user interfaces using a variety of controls that allow for PDF viewing, barcode interpretation, searching and finding, and other controls Secure your applications, and communicate securely with services via HTTP requests Sign and deploy your apps and optimize the binary file size Who This Book Is For Those building mobile applications on the Xamarin platform for iOS and Android. By mixing together the solutions and a thorough explanation of the basics of Xamarin.Forms, the book spans the needs of beginning through intermediate Xamarin.Forms developers. Even experts will find a few gems to improve the quality and speed of their application development work.

Learn everything you need to set up a full-featured, automated pipeline for Xamarin development and deployment. Automate everything from the build step through to deployment and delivery to your customer. If you thought this level of automation could be achieved only by large companies with generous funding, think again! You as a single developer, or working in a small team or company, can automate your processes to punch heavier than your weight. What's more, you can achieve this level of automation completely for free! This hands-on guide takes you step-by-step from setting up your first automated build all the way to integrated unit testing, and finally through to delivering a high-quality app to your testers and end users. The automation presented in this book saves a lot of frustration and recurring work, providing you more time to focus on building the robust and compelling apps that delight your customers and keep you steps ahead of the competition. Not only does this book teach how to get a grip on consistent quality, but it covers the use of HockeyApp to track events and usage, and to report errors and anomalies back to home base for developers to investigate. Many times it's possible to detect and fix errors before a user even notices they are there. This book: Teaches the necessity of an automated development pipeline Helps you set up an automated pipeline for Xamarin development Integrates testing (on physical devices!) to ensure high-quality apps What You'll Learn Why you want an automated development pipeline Obtain and configure the automated tooling Continuously integrate your apps Run automated unit tests Push updates to your customers Monitor and detect errors without user intervention Who This Book Is For App developers looking for ways to ensure consistent quality of work and wanting to know how their apps are doing in actual use by customers