Adding Xamarin.Forms Support

So far I’ve only had support for the new Windows platform clients (ie Windows and Windows Phone) for my Real Estate Inspector sample app. However, to make it successful we need to target more platforms. To this end I’m going to add support for iOS, Android and Windows Phone 8.0 using Xamarin.Forms.

After installing the Xamarin tooling for Visual Studio, I added a new project using the Blank App (Xamrain.Forms Portable) template. This actually look multiple attempts as I hadn’t updated the Xamarin tooling prior to creating the projects. I would highly recommend upgrading the tooling first!

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This will give you three target projects Driod, iOS and WinPhone, in addition to a PCL which contains the common code and ui for the applications. You should be able to build and run each of these targets – however, you’ll need to either register for a trial or have a Xamarin Business subscription. Since the UI is help in the PCL project, it’ll be the same across all the targets, although there may be platform rendering differences.

Now that we have these three targets, we’re going to have to connect up our Azure Mobile Service, work out how we’re going to deal with navigation and structure our solution to maximise code reuse across our Windows platform projects.

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