Xamarin is the leading company in cross-platform application development. This company was created by the same people who brought us Mono, MonoTouch, and Mono for Android, which were the very first cross-platform implementations of the Microsoft CLI (Common Language Structure) and CLS (Common Language Specification). Having a cross-platform CLI and CLS, which is often called .NET, allows us to develop a shared code base in C# to create a Windows Mobile, iOS, and Android application. As of last year, Xamarin has over half a million developers around the world. This success of Xamarin can be explained in many ways. First, they don't have much serious competition in the cross-platform mobile app development, they have a consequent developer base for Mono products and it works like a charm. Indeed, you do not need to have any knowledge about developing mobile applications to give it more than a try. Moreover, they provide a high-end IDE (integrated development environment), in which you can go from displaying a few words in a console to publishing a fully-fledged application in the applications store.
Chapter 1, Getting Started, talks about Xamarin Studio itself and the Android emulator needed to run our first Hello World application.
Chapter 2, Mastering the Life and Death of Android Apps, provides an in-depth and methodical approach to learning about activities' lifecycles and how to manage the different states of an Android Activity.
Chapter 3, Building a GUI, helps us familiarize ourselves with the Android GUI and prepares us to tackle every situation with no less than 19 different components.
Chapter 4, Using Android Resources, helps us make things look better by covering how to use splash screen, manage multiscreen, play songs or videos, and display our application icon.
Chapter 5, Using On-Phone Data, takes a leap forward in order to persist and access user data between different launches of our applications. To do so, you will learn about user preferences, file writing/reading, SQLite, and LinQ.
Chapter 6, Populating Your GUI with Data, completes the loop between the on-phone data of the previous chapter and the GUI of Chapter 4, Using Android Resources, by covering how to populate GUI elements with data.
Chapter 7, Using Android Services, shows how to create, bound to, and identify running Android services in order to pursue our application processes even when the users are not looking at them.
Chapter 8, Mastering Intents – A Walkthrough, covers how to switch back on forth between applications with Android Intents to access a contact number or an address on the map, for example.
Chapter 9, Playing with Advanced Graphics, will push forward the creation of advanced graphics, such as 2D graphics, in our application and animation. We will also take advantage of the Android API made available by Xamarin to use the camera.
Chapter 10, Taking Advantage of the Android Platform, brings the last piece to our GUI building skills by mastering Android fragments that represent the behavior or a portion of the user interface in an Activity.
Chapter 11, Using Hardware Interactions, guides us to interact with our phone's hardware, such as NFC, Bluetooth, Accelerometer, and GPS.
Chapter 12, Debugging and Testing, leverages the debugging and testing capacities of Xamarin Studio and the Android emulator.
Chapter 13, Monetizing and Publishing Your Applications, prepares us to build our final application and publish it to the Android Play Store.
Appendix, Mono – The Underlying Technology, exposes the key concepts about the technology that makes Xamarin possible.