Before joining Steemit, I was already blogging at msicc.net about some dev stuff I am doing. The posts are part of my story, so I think it is a good idea to link them also here. Even though I discovered that .NET is not one of the major languages/frameworks that people are talking about here, I hope that some of you will enjoy my contributions.
Xamarin Forms and MVVM
If you are a .NET developer like I am, you may be familiar with both Xamarin Forms and MVVM. As I started my dev career on Windows Phone years ago, it is only naturally that I ended up using Xamarin for cross platform development (given the fact that Windows Phone is dead).
What is this Xamarin Forms thing?
Xamarin Forms is a framework that aims to simplify cross platform development. The idea is to share as much code as possible while creating native apps on iOS, Android, Windows and more. On a high level, one can write UI and functionality in C#, Xamarin takes the code and compiles it into native code. On top of the Xamarin Forms framework, you can also implement platform specific functionality, which makes writing cross platform apps pretty flexible.
What is MVVM?
MVVM stands for "Model-View-ViewModel" and is a very popular pattern in the .NET world. It is all about separation of concerns, meaning the View should only be responsible for UI things, the Model only holds data, and both get connected via the ViewModel. A ViewModel should be written in a way it works also when changing the view, without the need of any changes to it.
There are also several MVVM-Frameworks like PRISM, MvvmCross and others. My personal favorite however is the MVVMLight Toolkit, which provides just the basic infrastructure and keeps things open for me.
So what gives?
Given the fact that one can share up to 80% of code logic and the different UIs the target operating systems have, MVVM helps to keep things clean and separated. There are already tons of blog posts floating around the web about how to use the MVVM pattern and Xamarin Forms together. I took some of them as inspiration to find my own way, and decided to share my implementations to inspire others and show how one can get stuff done.
Xamarin Forms, the MVVMLight Toolkit and I series
Here are all posts I have written so far in this series:
- Xamarin Forms, the MVVMLight Toolkit and I (new series)
- Xamarin Forms, the MVVMLight Toolkit and I: Dependecy Injection
- [Updated] Xamarin Forms, the MVVMLight Toolkit and I: navigation and modal pages
- Xamarin Forms, the MVVMLight Toolkit and I: showing dialog messages
- Xamarin Forms, the MVVMLight Toolkit and I: EventToCommandBehavior
- Xamarin Forms, the MVVMLight Toolkit and I: taking control over the back buttons
- Xamarin Forms, the MVVMLight Toolkit and I: loading bundled assets in the Forms project
Like always, I hope this blog series is helpful for some of you out there. In the meantime, happy coding, everyone!