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Free eBook on Xamarin.Forms Enterprise App Patterns Published
Microsoft has been publishing a series of free eBooks and accompanying blog posts providing guidance about .NET application architecture best practices, with the latest focusing on Xamarin.Forms patterns.
Previous guidance addressed microservices architecture, containerized Docker apps and modern Web apps with ASP.NET and Microsoft Azure. The guidance consists of detailed eBooks, end-to-end reference architecture applications used as examples and blog posts that can help developers get a gist of the guidance and decide if they want to dig deeper with an eBook and reference application.
The new guide, "Enterprise Application Patterns Using Xamarin.Forms," includes source code for a container-based eShop that extends the previous microservice/containers scenario. It includes the following functionality:
- Authenticating and authorizing with a back-end service.
- Browsing a catalog of shirts, coffee mugs and other marketing items.
- Filtering the catalog.
- Ordering items from the catalog.
- Viewing the user's order history.
- Configuring settings.
"Guidance is provided on how to implement MVVM, dependency injection, navigation, validation and configuration management while maintaining loose coupling," Microsoft said in a blog post. "In addition, there's also guidance on performing authentication and authorization with IdentityServer, accessing remote data from containerized microservices, and unit testing."
Developers don't have to create the full-blown implementation that consumes back-end services from containerized microservices, however. They can just consume mock data services if they aren't interested in how to deploy fully functional back-end services.
Written by David Britch, the 91-page book reportedly provides a comprehensive solution for Business-to-Employee (B2E), Business-to-Business (B2B) and Business-to-Consumer (B2C) apps that can share code across all target platforms -- iOS, Android and the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) -- and help lower the total cost of ownership (TCO).
The entire series of eBook guides is available on Microsoft's .NET Application Architecture site. The new Xamarin.Forms offering can be downloaded here (note that this link triggers an automatic download).
While primarily targeting an audience of developers interested in learning how to design and create cross-platform enterprise apps, the book says it can also serve to help technical decision-makers choose an appropriate approach for creating such apps.
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.