Category : Android Cross Platform Mobile App iOS Windows Phone Xamarin
Xamarin.Forms.DependencyService platform tweaks
November 17, 2014
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What is DependencyService in Xamarin ?
DependencyService is a static class under Xamarin.Forms namespace. Shared or Portable projects can access the platform based tweaks that are done in any specific platform projects by using DependencyService.
How it works?
The key point is by defining an Interface.
- Declare an Interface in the Shared / Portable project.
- Implement the interface in platform specific projects.
- Register the class under DependencyService Assembly with Dependency attribute.
- Call the DependencyService.get method with the Interface. It will identify the platform and executes the implementation
Categories: Android, Cross Platform Mobile App, iOS, Windows Phone, Xamarin
Xamarin.Mobile : Cross platform component for Device APIs
Xamarin.Mobile is a component from Xamarin to write a commonly used code to consume the device API. What I meant by the commonly used code is, the same code that will can access device specific APIs and behave accordingly depending upon the platform in which it is running.
More than a month back newest release of Xamarin.Mobile is still in its preview release mode.
As of now, it supports the following device APIs for iOS, Android and Windows Phone.
- Contacts
- Geolocation
- Media
Categories: Android, Cross Platform Mobile App, iOS, Windows Phone, Xamarin
How it compiles in Xamarin
What we must agree is, different platforms have different ways of understanding the assemblies. They execute and run the app in the same way. So Xamarin compiles the app in relevance to the platforms basing upon their nature and behavior of executing the assemblies. So that the app assembly fits to the platform acceptable format and run.
Compiling for iOS
iOS runs on ARM architecture. So the nature of iOS is, it understands the assembly language for ARM. It never allows the code to be generated dynamically during run time. So to respect the same, Xamarin did it exactly. It uses the Ahead Of Time (AOT) compilation process in order to generate ARM assemblies from the static code. This is a process to generate the pre-compiled code. Unlike the traditional on-demand execution approach, it compiles the code before hand. During the linking process, it links the .Net framework and the relevant assemblies only. It removes all others, which are no longer in use.
Categories: Android, Cross Platform Mobile App, iOS, Xamarin
[Proved] Xamarin Forms Content page can contain a single view
Xamarin Content page can contain a single view in it without any layout. Yes, that’s correct. But sometimes crazy thoughts strike to mind . Why should I believe unless I try that out?
You believe ??? But let me check before I agree with you
I am going to create a new Xamarin.Forms.Portable project using Visual Studio. Let me name this as “TryContentPage”. It will create 4 different projects out of which one is the Xamarin.Forms.Portable project and rest three of them are for platforms like iOS, Android and Windows Phone individually.
For now let’s ignore the other projects and concentrate on the Portable project only. To start with our experiment, let me add a XAML Form to that project and name it as “MyFirstPage” .
Categories: Cross Platform Mobile App, Xamarin