Building Your First Xamarin.Android App from Start to Store

Course Overview
Hi and welcome to this Pluralsight course named Building Your First Xamarin. Android App from Start to Store. My name is Gill Cleeren and I'll be your instructor for this course. I love talking, but I also love coding, and coding is exactly what you'll be doing in this course. This is a practical course aimed at teaching you everything you need to know to build Xamarin. Android apps. I'll give you the necessary topics to understand to get you on your way, in some slides of course. But only slides and some basic demos would be, in my opinion, a bit boring. That's why we'll be building together a fully working app. We'll start from scratch and by the end of this course you'll end up with a complete app, isn't that great? So if the thought of having built your first Android application within the next 3 hours or so sounds exciting to you, you've come to the right place. So sit back, relax, and enjoy this Pluralsight course. As you may have seen from the Pluralsight website, this first module is pretty short. I won't be teaching you anything just yet. I'll start doing that very soon in the second module of this course that is. So this module is aimed at giving you an overview of what to expect from this course. I will highlight some of the learning topics that we'll cover in this course first. As promised, we'll be building an app together in this course, so that after watching this course you can walk away with a real working app that you can use to impress your. NET friends. So also in this module I'll show you the completed application to get you inspired and I'll be explaining the scenario for this application as well. This will give you a good idea what we're working towards.

Creating the App and First View
Hi and welcome to the third module already of this Pluralsight course titled Building Your First Xamarin. Android App From Start to Store. I'm Gill Cleeren and you can follow me on Twitter via @gillcleeren. In the previous module we have created a solid foundation for our application. So with the use of a portable class library we have separated our reusable code in a separate project. We are not going to add the actual Xamarin. Android project, so the real application project, and we are going to create our first screen in the app as well. By the end of the module we'll already have a very small app with just one screen. As always, a small overview of what we are going to do in this very module to start with. I'm going to start by explaining you the core concepts, the fundamentals of Android development. Android is different in many aspects from let's say Windows development, so it's vital that I explain these fundamental concepts first. We'll conclude this part by adding the Xamarin. Android project to our solution. Secondly, we are going to create a simple view in our application. This will be the hot dog detail view. A detail screen which is already using a number of typical Android.

Adding a Menu Page
Hello and welcome to module 4 of this Pluralsight course titled Building Your First Xamarin. Android App From Start to the Store. My name hasn't changed, so it's still Gill Cleeren and you can of course contact me still in the same way as in the last module, so that is through my website or via Twitter using @gillcleeren. We have closed the last module by creating the detailed page for a particular hot dog using some of the built-inviews that come with the Android SDK. Now in this module we'll work on another view and another activity, that is, we will be creating the menu page showing a list of hot dogs available in Ray's app. Let's start by taking a look at how we are going to handle things in this chapter. We are, as said, going to start by creating the Menu page and we'll put on this page a list containing all hot dogs available for purchase. We will start with the basic list, but in the second part of this module we are going to customize the list by changing the used Row Style. This will allow us to display the data the way we want it to be displayed.

Adding Navigation
Hi there and welcome to module 5 of this Pluralsight course named Building Your First Xamarin. Android App From Start to Store. I'm still Gill Cleeren and if you have any questions, reach out via the discussion board for this course or contact me via Twitter via @gillcleeren. In the previous module we have created our second screen, so the overview screen, showing all hot dogs that you can purchase at Ray's Hot Dogs. That screen will actually still be in the spotlight in this module while we're adding several types of navigation to our app. We're going to start by adding the obvious way for navigation, we are going to allow the user to navigate from the overview screen to the detail screen, so basically allowing the user to navigate from one activity to another. When we are ready with that, we are going to add tab navigation, again, to the Menu page. Instead of showing a long list of hot dogs, we are going to allow the user to select a tab showing the corresponding type of hot dogs.

Using Advanced Android Features
Hello and welcome to the 6th module of this Pluralsight course titled Building Your First Xamarin. Android App From Start to Store. I'm Gill Cleeren and you can contact me via Twitter using @gillcleeren. In the previous module we have pretty much finished the work for the main functionality of our application. In this module we are, however, going to extend our application with some extra features. We're also going to change the shared code so it's using data from an actual service instead of using the hard coded data that we've used so far. Let's get started. First, a small stop to take a look at the agenda. We're going to start by adding the possibility to take pictures directly from our app. It's quite a trend to take pictures of everything that we eat and Ray also wants to jump on this bandwagon with his app. So who are we to argue with him? Next we're going to add map support in our app. It's definitely a useful feature for an app to show a map inside of the app, allowing the user, in our case, to see where the physical store of Ray is located. In the third and final part of this module we are going to change the code in our shared library a little bit, so it's going to talk to an actual service instead of working with hard coded data. Sounds good? Happy to hear. Let's go.

Preparing for Store Deployment
Hi there and welcome to the last module of this Pluralsight course titled Building Your First Xamarin. Android App From Start to Store. My name is still Gill Cleeren and you can contact me via Twitter using @gillcleeren. We are ready with the actual development work of our app. That's great, but our app is currently still only on our own device and honestly there are a few things that we need to polish. In this last module we are going to finalize our app and get it ready for deployment in the store. It's a tradition so we'll stick to it, we're starting off the module with a quick look at the agenda. We're going to start by learning how we can add application icons to our app. Right now our app is using the default icon that was added by the Visual Studio template. That's not what we'll want when our app is deployed on other devices. In the second part I'm going to show you how you actually translate an Android app. You'll see, it's a very easy process. And finally we are going to prepare our app for deployment in the store, this way we are going to be able to reach millions and millions of possible customers for Rays.