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Acquisitions and Project Editor: Devon Musgrave Cover illustration: Serena Zhang Table of contents Introduction .............................................................................................................. 7 Who should read this book .......................................................................................................................................................... 7 Assumptions ................................................................................................................................................................................. 7 Organization of this book ............................................................................................................................................................. 7 Conventions and features in this book..................................................................................................................................... 8 System requirements ...................................................................................................................................................................... 8 Downloads: Code samples ............................................................................................................................................................ 9 Updating the code samples ................................................................................................................................................... 9 Acknowledgments ..........................................................................................................................................................................10 Free ebooks from Microsoft Press ............................................................................................................................................10 We want to hear from you .........................................................................................................................................................10 Chapter 1 How does Xamarin.Forms fit in?......................................... 11 Cross-platform mobile development ......................................................................................................................................12 The mobile landscape ............................................................................................................................................................12 Problem 1: Different user-interface paradigms ...........................................................................................................12 Problem 2: Different development environments ......................................................................................................13 Problem 3: Different programming interfaces .............................................................................................................13 Problem 4: Different programming languages ............................................................................................................13 The C# and .NET solution ...........................................................................................................................................................14 A single language for all platforms ...................................................................................................................................15 Sharing code ..............................................................................................................................................................................16 Introducing Xamarin.Forms .......................................................................................................................................................18 The Xamarin.Forms option ...................................................................................................................................................18 XAML support ............................................................................................................................................................................20 Platform specificity ..................................................................................................................................................................22 2 A cross-platform panacea? ..................................................................................................................................................23 Your development environment ...............................................................................................................................................23 Machines and IDEs ..................................................................................................................................................................24 Devices and emulators...........................................................................................................................................................24 Installation ........................................................................................................................................................................................25 Creating an iOS app................................................................................................................................................................25 Creating an Android app ......................................................................................................................................................26 Creating a Windows Phone app ........................................................................................................................................26 All ready? .....................................................................................................................................................................................26 Chapter 2 Pages, layouts, and views ......................................................27 Say hello ............................................................................................................................................................................................28 Anatomy of a Xamarin.Forms solution ................................................................................................................................. 30 The iOS project .........................................................................................................................................................................32 The Android project ................................................................................................................................................................33 The Windows Phone project ...............................................................................................................................................34