Preface

Xamarin is built on top of Mono, an open source version of the .NET framework, based on the ECMA standards. Xamarin brings you a set of tools that includes its own C# compiler and a Common Language Runtime (CLR). The Mono framework source project is maintained by Xamarin, a San Francisco-based company (formerly by Novell and originally by Ximian). The prime intention of the Mono project was to make the .NET platform compatible with other non-Windows platforms such as Linux.

After Attachmate acquired Novell in April 2011, the future of the Mono platform was pushed into dark. A few months later, Miguel de Icaza, a former Novell employee, founded a company called Xamarin and declared to continue using the Mono platform for commercial software development. Since then, Xamarin has sponsored the Mono open source platform development and provided the commercial .NET stacks for both the iOS and Android platforms. The .NET for iOS is called MonoTouch, or Xamarin.iOS, and .NET for Android is called Mono for Android, or Xamarin.Android.

Xamarin frameworks enable developers to write cross-platform mobile applications targeting different platforms, including iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. Using Xamarin, you can develop a pure naive Android or iOS application using the C# programming language and share the application logic between the different platforms. This results in a faster development cycle and developers can leverage the existing C# and .NET programming skills, which helps reduce the learning curve to develop the mobile application.

This book is structured in a logical sequence to help C# and .NET developers to build Xamarin.Android applications from the ground up. It explains the widely used basic and advanced Android concepts, including a user interface, data storage, consuming web services, geolocation, map, camera, and the build distribution process.

This book provides the most comprehensive explanations of the basic and advanced Xamarin.Android concepts; you can precisely build with practical live examples to develop a complete working application. Over the course of this book, you will build a single application, the POIApp. With this application, we will cover all the fundamentals of Xamarin.Android to help you get stated with your own application development.