Xamarin: Cross-Platform Mobile Application Development

Chapter 11. Xamarin.Forms

Since the beginning of Xamarin's lifetime as a company, their motto has always been to expose the native APIs on iOS and Android directly to C#. This was a great strategy at the beginning, because applications built with Xamarin.iOS or Xamarin.Android were pretty much indistinguishable from a native Objective-C or Java application. Code sharing was generally limited to non-UI code that left a potential gap to fill in the Xamarin ecosystem: a cross-platform UI abstraction. Xamarin.Forms is the solution to this problem, a cross-platform UI framework that renders native controls on each platform. Xamarin.Forms is a great solution for those who know C# (and XAML), but also might not want to get into the full details of using ...