What is Xamarin? How does Xamarin.Forms differ from Xamarin.Android and Xamarin.iOS? What code can I share across my apps? Can I develop on Windows and macOS? This course answers these questions and more. By the end of the course, you will be able to choose the Xamarin approach that is right for you. You will also set up your development machine and run an app on Windows, the iOS simulator, and an Android emulator.

Most apps contain multiple pages. The most common way to implement this in Android is using one Activity for each page and stack navigation to transition between pages. This course shows you how to code the core patterns that make Activities work together. You will see how to start Activities, pass arguments, and retrieve results. You will also see how to launch standard Android Activities such as the camera or the web browser.

The first step in becoming a Xamarin.iOS developer is getting an app up and running. This course takes you through the entire development process. You will create a new project in Visual Studio, code the user interface and behavior, build the project, and test it on an iPhone simulator. As you build your app, you will learn several iOS design patterns such as Model-View-Controller, protocols, and delegates.

It is challenging to create a UI that looks good and works well on multiple devices with different screen sizes and different pixel densities. IOS handles this using the concept of constraints. Instead of giving fixed sizes and positions, you specify relationships such as “align these two views vertically” or “stretch this view to fit all the available space”. This course first shows you how to use constraints to layout the views on a single screen. It then broadens the discussion to show you how to use segues to link together multiple pages in your app.

One advantage of Xamarin over the traditional platform-specific approach is the level of code-sharing you can achieve across Windows, iOS, and Android. In this class, we will explore ways to structure your shared code using Portable Class Libraries, .NET Standard libraries, and Shared Asset Projects. We will look at the pros and cons of each approach and see how to access platform-specific features in each model.

Users expect to access their information any time from any location using any device. This leads most app developers to store data in the cloud and retrieve it as needed from client devices. REST-based web services are the dominant strategy for this type of device-to-server communication. In this course, you will see how to consume REST-based web services with HttpClient using both the managed networking stack and the platform-specific handlers that boost performance. You will also learn some common strategies for dealing with the unique challenges that mobile devices face when communicating over the network.

Many apps need to store data locally on the device so it is available even when network access is unreliable. User preferences, data files, and relational data can all fall into this category. This course starts with a survey of the local-storage options available to you in your Xamarin applications. It then concentrates on storing relational data using a SQLite database. By the end of the course, you will have seen how to identify the proper location for your database file and how to insert, update, retrieve, and delete data efficiently using asynchronous I/O calls.

The goal for most developers is to get their apps into the various stores and then onto customer devices. There are many steps between the time your app is code-complete and when it is ready for submission the stores. This course shows you how to prepare for publishing regardless of which platforms you support or the store you intend to use. It includes advice for making your app look good, instructions on using the linker to reduce the size of your app, and some guidance on selecting a store.

Xamarin.Forms lets you define a single UI that you share across all your supported platforms. This maximizes your ability to share code: you can share your UI and your business logic. In this course, you will create a new Xamarin.Forms application and define your shared UI in code. You will also see how to access platform-specific features such as the phone dialer or camera that do not have a shared-programming model integrated into Xamarin.Forms.

Xamarin.Forms lets you define your UI using the eXtensible Application Markup Language (XAML). This gives you a clean separation of UI and behavior and makes it easy to utilize a design expert and design tools. This course shows you how to define your UI in XAML. You will create pages and add controls, all in markup. You will also see how to access UI elements from code so you can subscribe to UI events and update UI properties as your data changes.

Using the same fonts and colors across your entire UI creates a consistent look-and-feel. Xamarin.Forms provides a way to define these values in one place and look them up everywhere they are used; this guarantees consistency across your app and makes updates simple. This course shows you how to define and apply a Resource both in code and in XAML. It also shows you how to group multiple settings into a Style so you can apply them all at once.

Xamarin.Forms apps run on a wide range of devices with varying screen sizes and pixel densities. It is challenging to create a UI that looks good and behaves correctly in all cases. Xamarin.Forms helps solve this problem by providing flexible layout containers that can calculate the size and position of your UI controls automatically; they even recalculate if the user rotates the device or changes the size of the app’s window. This course contains in-depth coverage of StackLayout and Grid, the two most popular layout containers in Xamarin.Forms. It also shows you how to add scrolling when your UI is too large for the available screen area.