Taskos - Xamarin cross-platform development cookbook a recipe-based practical guide to get you up and running with Xamarin cross-platform development

George Taskos is a senior software engineer. He has been creating applications professionally since 2005, and he started coding at the age of 8. George has worked as a consultant for the past 10 years in the enterprise and consumer domains.

George is a Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer since 2009 and Xamarin Certified Mobile Developer. Throughout his career, he has created multitier interoperable applications with various technologies, including Windows Forms, WPF, ASP.NET MVC, SOAP, and REST web services, focusing on native iOS/Android and Xamarin Cross Platform Mobile applications for the past 5 years.

As a professional, he worked with small and large enterprises in Greece, Cyprus, South Africa, UK, and USA where he is currently based in New York City.

George is a passionate engineer involved in the start-up community by contributing his free time. He was a member of the BugSense mobile analytics team that was acquired by a NASDAQ big data analytics corporation in 2013.

Currently, he is working with Verisk Analytics, a NASDAQ 100 company, leading the engineering of Xamarin iOS/Android platforms and working in general software architecture of products.

I would like to thank my wife, Natalya Taskos, for putting up with my all night sessions in the writing of the book and trying to find the next best practice and technology to create the amazing software.

Stan Okunevic is a speaker, entrepreneur, and a true lover of All Things Mobile. Having dropped out of university to start a career in software consultancy, he entered the world of Xamarin by accidenthaving stumbled upon mentions of MonoTouch while looking for something new to learn and has not looked back since. Having worked with a wide array of clients ranging from small, stealth-mode start-ups to Fortune 50 companies, he has gained invaluable insight into what it takes to build a product and run a team.

Nowadays, he spends most of his time expanding his technology consultancy, building various products of his own whenever an opportunity arises, studying for an MSc degree in Cyber Security and updating his personal blog at Nowadays, he spends most of his time expanding his technology consultancy, building various products of his own whenever an opportunity arises, studying for an MSc degree in Cyber Security and updating his personal blog at daytimehacker.com.

I'd like to thank each and every one of my clients to trust me and my team, as well as everyone I have worked with in the early stages of my career to provide invaluable advice. Special thanks to Paul F. Johnson for the review recommendation that reviewing the book has been of immense pleasure.

There is no better time for advancing your toolbox with cross-platform mobile development using Xamarin.Forms. Xamarin has over 1,300,000 registered developers and 15,000 clients, it is now the standard in enterprise mobility, and the demand for cross-platform Xamarin mobile developers is very high. The idea behind Xamarin.Forms is that you're no longer only able to share your business logic but the UI code across iOS, Android and Windows Phone. With Xamarin, you can open your favorite IDE, Visual Studio, or use Xamarin Studio, to create cross-platform applications using C# while still generating and deploying a 100% native platform application.

If you know C#, you know how to create native cross-platform, and this book will just make it easier for you.

You will learn everything available to combine your application and build RAD mobile applications. Even if there is a requirement to work on the native application layers, you will find step-by-step recipes that provide you with the knowledge and understanding of how to accomplish your goal.

Work with the UI in XAML or in code, and learn how every control and page is mapped to each equivalent native UI component. Create custom views, call platform APIs, and explore all the cross-platform types of pages, layouts and controls. Create your own cross-platform plugin, and deploy it to NuGet for other developers or commercial purposes.

At the core of the book, the focus is on cross-platform architecture: how to efficiently share code between all platforms, use the built-in dependency service locator, and configure your solution to use a third-party dependency injection using aspect-oriented programming.

Using a cross-platform UI framework doesn't mean that your UI should be coupled to the rest of your code; in this book, the MVVM architecture is demonstrated by injecting the ViewModel in the XAML and using data binding to sync your data between UI controls and models, keeping clean the separation of concerns.