Cross-Platform Mobile Development with Xamarin

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In Text Rendering with Xamarin, I drilled down into the countless ways and options that Xamarin provides you to display text on the screen of multiple mobile devices. In this article, I’ll focus on the cross-platform mechanisms and the support for per-platform code in Xamarin.

SAP vs. PCL

Xamarin Forms provides two different paths to cross-platform applications. The shared assets project (SAP) contains files that are included directly with each platform’s project at build time. The portable class library (PCL) is different and creates a share dynamic link library that is loaded at runtime by each platform’s application. The difference is important, as you’ll soon see, because there are different techniques you can use when you know at build time what platform the code is going to run on vs. at runtime only.

Code vs. XAML

Xamarin Forms exposes a cross-platform object model for laying out UI elements on the screen…

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