Developing Mobile Applications with Xamarin

 When you're dealing with cross-platform development with Xamarin, it is important to understand that the application source cannot be completely cross-platform. Platform-agnostic modules of a Xamarin application vary, depending on the application's content, as well as the development approach that's used. Xamarin classic and Xamarin.Forms are two different approaches to creating native applications for (mainly) iOS and Android platforms. While Xamarin classic uses a more native approach, literally migrating the native platform implementation strategy to the .NET ecosystem, Xamarin.Forms delivers an additional abstraction layer for the native UI implementation.

In this chapter, we will learn about Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms development strategies and create a Xamarin.Forms application that we will develop throughout the remainder of this book. We will also discuss architectural models that might help us along the way.

The following sections will guide you through implementing a cross-platform native mobile application using the Xamarin framework and toolset:

• Xamarin versus Xamarin.Forms
• Xamarin application anatomy
• Selecting the presentation architecture
• Useful architectural patterns