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5 Reasons Why The Xamarin - Forms Shell Will Increase Your Productivity. - Cool Coders

The document discusses 5 reasons why the new Xamarin.Forms Shell will increase developer productivity when building mobile apps. The Shell provides a new way to structure apps with hierarchical navigation and customizable sections and tabs. It streamlines tasks like navigation, searching, and maintaining a consistent user interface across platforms. The Shell's features aim to reduce the need for platform-specific code and simplify building complex mobile apps.

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)

34 views

5 Reasons Why The Xamarin - Forms Shell Will Increase Your Productivity. - Cool Coders

Uploaded by

hsuyip

Available Formats

Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

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doumer.me

5 Reasons Why The Xamarin.Forms

Shell Will Increase Your Productivity.
- Cool Coders
6-7 minutes

C# , Xamarin ,

Tags: xamarin, Xamarin.Forms

20 Dec

Xamarin.Forms Shell New Paradigm

Hello friends, Xamarin.Forms 4.0 Preview was made available

for some time already, and it has several features which I’m
excited about. These features where announced months ago,
but the one which caught my attention was the Xamarin.Forms
Shell. This feature is not yet available on the UWP platform as
I’m writing this blog post today. But you can play with it and get

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acquainted with the awesome benefits it brings to you on iOS

and Android. Do this by browsing and running the source code
of the demo application on Github. Or reading the
documentation available. I though of making this blog post
earlier, but as all my subscribers might have noticed, I wasn’t
active here for a few months now I’m glad I’m back …

What is the Xamarin.Forms Shell?

The Shell simply put is a brand-new way of structuring your

entire application. This approach is very opinionated and comes
with several goodies to facilitate the process of scaffolding your
entire application, implementing navigation, search etc…

What Are The Awesome Features Brought To You

With Xamarin.Forms Shell?

The shell provides URI navigation from one page to another,

which is easier and more efficient than the previous navigation.
This liberates you from the lot of code you needed to write to
implement navigation and managing the navigation stack.
You simply specify a URL to the page to which you want to
navigate and let Xamarin.Forms do its magic and take you to
the appropriate page.

You can intercept navigation before it completes, and perform

what ever task you wish, what ever animation and personalise
the navigation’s behavior as you wish.

You can easily pass data from one page to another while
navigating, by adding this data as a URL parameter, (very
similar to calling a controller on ASP.Net Core).

Real access to the navigation bar. As stated by David Ortinau

in this video. The navigation bar will be modifiable and really

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customized by the developer. As compared to the TitleView

which permits you to only add views to the navigation bar, with
the Xamarin.Forms Shell, modifying core components of the
navigation bar like the “Back Button” could be handled by the
developer. This brings much more power into our hands .

You can easily structure your application in one main file.

Thanks to this, scaffolding your application into hierarchical
visual elements is very easy. You just need to grasp the basics
and smoothly define the whole structure of what your application
will look like directly. In a very clean hierarchical fashion with the
shell items, shell section and shell content. Before moving
ahead, I think I should state what the shell items, shell section
and shell content is all about. As stated in this documentation,
The Shell Item represent one item present in the shell’s fly-out.
This item is represented on the fly-out with a title, an icon and
this representation on the fly-out can obviously be personalized
with a data template. You can also have Menu Items present on
the fly-out, but unlike shell items, menu items lack shell
sections.

Shell sections are children of Shell Items. There can be several

shell sections in a shell item. These shell sections will be
navigable via bottom tabs. Each has its title and Icons can be
set for them too.

Shell content, these are children of the shell section and each
represent a content page of your application. A shell section can
have several shell contents. Shell contents are represented by
top navigation tabs. As you might have noticed while going
through these, adding bottom and top tabbed navigation and
separating the content for each section is easy. This along side
the flyout navigation, permits you to worry less about structuring
complex apps which you build.

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Searching through the content of your page is facilitated by

the search handler, which provides you a smart way of handling
search. As you can see in this demo source code, all you do is
just implement an appropriate search handler for your page,
Override the “OnQueryChanged” method for it to perform what
ever you want with the searched keyword typed by the user, and
add your custom search handler to your page.

Consistent Look and feel for your app on each platform is

possible by default in Xamarin.Forms. As stated by David
Ortinau in this video, you will be able to either chose the
Material theme or later, the Cupertino theme. And still have the
option to have native look and feel for your applications. I wish
“Fluent Design” by Microsoft could be available as a them.
Fluent design is so beautiful according to me and should not be
neglected.

Conclusion

The Xamarin.Forms Shell is a brand-new feature, and an

awesome paradigm for building apps with Xamarin.Forms.
Several other awesome features to improve developer
productivity and ameliorations to Xamarin.Forms are available
with the Shell. But these are the ones which I think will impact
directly every Xamarin.Forms developer. I think the more
Xamarin.Forms will permit building applications with less need
to access Platform specific code, the better it becomes for
developpers.

To have a detailed explanation and a deep insight of the

features talked about in this blog post, source code is required. I
could make a demo as I usually do for other blog posts, but here
are links to resources which have already been made available
to serve this purpose. I went through these resources to write

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