Xamarin: Cross-Platform Mobile Application Development

Summary

In this chapter, we covered the basics of Xamarin.Forms and learned how it can be very useful to build your own cross-platform applications. Xamarin.Forms shines for certain types of apps, but can be limiting if you need to write more complicated UIs or take advantage of native drawing APIs. We discovered how to use XAML to declare our Xamarin.Forms UIs and understood how Xamarin.Forms controls are rendered on each platform. We also dived into the concepts of data binding and discovered how to use the MVVM design pattern with Xamarin.Forms. Last but not least, we began porting the XamChat application that was discussed earlier in the module to Xamarin.Forms and we were able to reuse most of the backend code.