Using common platform features

The biggest challenge when developing a cross-platform application is the specific platform features APIs. Many common platform features exists across the platforms, but there isn't always a simple way to use them. For instance, showing an alert dialog message box or opening a URL from your application is a supported feature for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone but the APIs are completely different and platform specific, and a Portable Class Library has no access to all these features.

For our convenience, Xamarin.Forms supports some of the common platform-specific features out of the box. The architectural design and how you can create your own abstractions and implementations to use them in runtime in the portable ...

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