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If you have all the time and money in the world, you can build an Android app and an iOS app and maybe a Windows app in their native environment. But what if you don't have all the time in the world? How can you write an app that works on all mobile platforms? This is where Xamarin Forms comes in.
XAML is the UI-language important for developers using the Microsoft developer stack. This module teaches students how to use the XAML language for building all kinds of applications, focusing on Xamarin Forms.
This module gives you an overview of what kinds of controls are available and how to compose them together.
Mobile hardware becomes more and more diverse: big screens, double screens, high resolutions, low resolutions, .... This does require some special up-front design. In this module students will learn the different controls to keep a nice UI on all devices.
How to reuse objects like colors, sizes, etc... in your application? XAML has re-use built in, so in this module students will learn how to re-use objects for their applications.
How do you apply a style to your whole application ? Xaml makes this easy with styles and templates. In this module students will learn how to quickly customize their whole application with styles and templates.
End users should easily see when an element on your UI is interactive, or when a new element has been added to your window. These things can easily be accomplished by Animations, which greatly improves the user experience. In this module students will learn how provide feedback to the user using animations.
In many cases some data needs to be displayed to the user. Changes in data need to be validated and captured efficiently. In this module students will learn how to use data binding to accomplish this.
Multiple screen-size, portrait-mode, landscape-mode. How do we make a screen that looks good, and which adapts when you turn your screen ? You'll learn all about it in this chapter.
An application with only one screen ? It happens, but most application have multiple screens. How do you jump between screens, how do you pass information between screens?
The fact remains that you are developing for different platforms with different possibilities and a lot of differences. How can you deal with that ?
Xamarin Essentials is a library that helps you overcome the difference on the different platforms. Some functionalities normally need to be implemented against the different platforms. Essentials already has a whole bunch of functionalities covered for you.
Applications start and stop constantly. Sometimes you need to save some state for fetching again later. We'll see how to do that here
Spotify keeps playing music, even when you don't see it on the screen. Runkeeper keeps tracking your speed, and location while not being active on the screen. Let's find out how your app can do that.
An application that downloads data to show you, every time you open it. How slow would that be? And what do you do with the entered data, when you are offline ? Store data on the device itself might help you in those scenarios.
How to talk to webservices for getting and sending data? You'll learn all about it in this chapter
User input needs to be validated. Are all required properties provided? Do the values match the format? In this chapter you will see several options for validation.
MVVM is a design pattern which is very popular with technologies relying on declarative databinding, like XAML
"If this then that", that's what behaviors are all about. It allows you to set up new functionality for an existing control in a declarative way.
Everybody hates those constant on-screen notifications. Learn how to be annoying in this module!
Sending push messages to a device that is constantly moving is not a trivial task. Fortunately, Google, Apple and Microsoft provide their own solution for that. Once again you want to avoid doing things three times. That's where Notification Hubs come in.
"You can do anything with C# that you can do with Java". But what if the code is already written in Java can I still use it in my Xamarin.Android app? Yes, you can. And you can do the same for iOS and Objective-C/Swift by using library bindings.
Finally, your work is done. The last thing to do is add the app to the stores.
Creating a mobile app is seldom creating one app. It's creating one app per platform. Learning different platforms is time consuming. Xamarin Forms allows us to do this in a much more efficient way. One language to rule them all: C#, while staying true to the platform. And only one UI paradigm to learn, in which we create the UI only once using XAML. Xamarin is based upon Mono, the open-source implementation of the .NET runtime. By combining reusable C# code and Xamarin Forms UI, Xamarin is able to create cross-platform native apps with all the features and power of the native platforms.
Participants of this course need to have a good understanding of C# and a notion of mobile app development.