Sole Alessandro Del - Xamarin with Visual Studio

My wonderful wife Angelica, Ill love you until the end

Alessandro Del Sole is a senior software engineer working on building mobile apps with Xamarin in the healthcare industry. He has been using Xamarin since 2015 and is a Xamarin Certified Mobile Developer. Alessandro has also been Microsoft Most Valuable Professional since 2008, and has authored many technical books, eBooks, articles, instructional videos and has been speaker in the most important Italian conferences. He has also been recently appointed as C# Corner MVP.

Ninaada is a Xamarin certified mobile developer with 10+ years of industry experience. He has extensively worked on Xamarin based projects for more than 6 years, across various domains and industries including Fortune 500 companies. He also is active in the xamarin community by contributing to GitHub and blogging occasionally. Currently, he is working as a Xamarin developer with Steer73. He also has a keen interest in nature and wildlife photography, which can be found on his social media pages. Find more at https://linktr.ee/ninaada

I would first like to thank so much my wife, Angelica, who respects the time I need to write and that never stops to be supportive to me, always demonstrating to me so much love.

I would like to then thank the team at BPB Publications for being so supportive. I have been authoring books for 15 years, but this was my first time with them, and the whole team made it simpler for me to approach to a different way of working.

Special thanks to the amazing Arielle (https://imarielle.com), whose music has been my fuel during the many hours I spent writing.

Finally, I would like to thank all the readers of this book and all those who have read other books or articles I wrote in the past years. Writing is a big effort, so you need a motivation to do it and having had good feedback over the years, is the right motivation for me to still write.

This book covers mobile app development from the point of view of the developer that wants to target both iOS and Android systems from one codebase, using development tools from Microsoft.

The book is intended for both the experienced and the novice developers, with a special, practical approach for those who want to start a new career as software developers in the mobile apps industry.

Basic knowledge of the C# programming language is recommended, however the book introduces general programming and language-specific concepts that will be used across the book, so that also the novice developer can be familiar with all the discussed topics.

The goal of the book is explaining how to build mobile apps from the ground up, focusing on all the necessary aspects: the user interface, the logic, the interaction with Web services, the consumption of data, the way an app should be architected for mobile devices.

Special focus is also offered for those who want to start searching a new occupation as software developers with a Microsoft technical background.

This book is divided into 15 chapters. The first four chapters introduce the reader into the world of software development with C#, Microsoft Visual Studio and .NET. Chapters from 5 to 13 are all technical chapters that cover the development of mobile apps with Xamarin, in a cross-platform approach. The last two chapters have specific focus on starting, building, and maintaining a career as a successful mobile developer. Below you find the details of each chapter.

describes why it is important to be a mobile app developer today, and why building apps in a cross-platform approach is the best choice especially for jobseekers.

describes how Microsoft jumped into the mobile app development ecosystem. An introduction to Xamarin is made, plus a you find a discussion about why choosing Xamarin as the development platform can be the key to success today.

gives an introduction on the .NET technology (including the latest updates) and to Microsoft Visual Studio as a development environment

is intended to give absolute beginners a quick overview of the C# programming language to make them feel more comfortable with the development tools used across the book.

describes how to create a Xamarin solution with Microsoft Visual Studio, explaining how the code sharing strategy works to deliver apps to multiple OSes from the same codebase.

explains the fundamentals of user interface in mobile apps, and how to create adaptive and auto-sizing user interfaces using layouts.

chapter describes how to create the user interface of an app with the controls offered by Xamarin and how to manage user interaction with controls.

describes how to organize the user interface of an app in pages, the different kinds of pages and how navigation between pages works.

describes the concept of reusable resource and explains how to connect data objects to the user interface for automatic communication. It also explains how to use local SQLite databases to store, retrieve and display data.