Fr

ee

Xamarin Studio for Android Programming: A C# Cookbook

Starting with introducing Xamarin Studio, its underlying technologies, and the Android ecosystem,
the book goes on to cover the graphical aspects of creating Android applications. Moving on, you will
learn more about data management with Android services. This is followed by techniques for
interacting with the Android OS and the phone's hardware, before concluding with mobile
advertisements and Google Play. By the end of this book, you will have discovered all the techniques
related to developing an Android application with Xamarin Studio.

What this book will do

for you...
Build a GUI for your Android applications
Explore Android activities and understand

configuration changes
Manage multiscreens, icons, and multimedia

in your applications
Start and bind Android services and

create notifications

Inside the Cookbook...

A straightforward and easy-to-follow format
A selection of the most important tasks

Create beautiful applications using a camera

and animations

Xamarin Studio for Android Programming:

A C# Cookbook

Multiplatform applications have taken the development world by storm. Xamarin Studio is emerging as
the preferred choice among .NET/C# developers. It enables them to design cross-platform applications
using their favorite language and IDE.

with applications

problems efficiently

Clear explanations of what you did

real-world problems

advertisement providers for your applications

$ 44.99 US
28.99 UK
"Community
Experience
Distilled"

Mathieu Nayrolles

Solutions that can be applied to solve

Integrate advertisements and select the right

pl
e

Quick answers to common problems

and problems

Carefully organized instructions to solve

Effectively leverage your phone's hardware

Sa

Xamarin Studio for Android

Programming: A C# Cookbook
Over 50 hands-on recipes to help you get grips with Xamarin
Studio and C# programming to develop market-ready Android
applications

Prices do not include

local sales tax or VAT
where applicable

Visit www.PacktPub.com for books, eBooks,

code, downloads, and PacktLib.

Mathieu Nayrolles

In this package, you will find:

The author biography

A preview chapter from the book, Chapter 1 'Getting Started'
A synopsis of the books content
More information on Xamarin Studio for Android Programming:
A C# Cookbook

About the Author

Mathieu Nayrolles was born in France and lived in a small village in Cte d'Azur for almost
15 years. He started his studying computer science in France and continued in Montral,
Canada, where he now lives with his wife. He holds a master's degree in software engineering
from eXia.Cesi and another in computer science from UQAM. He is currently a PhD student
in electrical and computer engineering at Concordia University, Montral, Canada, under the
supervision of Dr. Wahab Hamou-Lhadj.
As well as his academic journey, Mathieu has also worked for worldwide companies such as
Eurocopter and Saint-Gobain where he learned how important good technical resources are.
You can discover some of his work through his books Instant Magento Performances and
Magento Performance Optimization: How to and Mastering Apache. You can also check out
his blog (https://math.co.de/) or latest realizations: bumper-app.com, mindup.io
and toolwatch.io.
Follow him on Twitter at @MathieuNls for more information.

Preface
Xamarin is the leading company in cross-platform application development. This company
was created by the same people who brought us Mono, MonoTouch, and Mono for Android,
which were the very first cross-platform implementations of the Microsoft CLI (Common
Language Structure) and CLS (Common Language Specification). Having a cross-platform CLI
and CLS, which is often called .NET, allows us to develop a shared code base in C# to create a
Windows Mobile, iOS, and Android application. As of last year, Xamarin has over half a million
developers around the world. This success of Xamarin can be explained in many ways. First,
they don't have much serious competition in the cross-platform mobile app development, they
have a consequent developer base for Mono products and it works like a charm. Indeed, you
do not need to have any knowledge about developing mobile applications to give it more than
a try. Moreover, they provide a high-end IDE (integrated development environment), in which
you can go from displaying a few words in a console to publishing a fully-fledged application in
the applications store.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Getting Started, talks about Xamarin Studio itself and the Android emulator
needed to run our first Hello World application.
Chapter 2, Mastering the Life and Death of Android Apps, provides an in-depth and methodical
approach to learning about activities' lifecycles and how to manage the different states of an
Android Activity.
Chapter 3, Building a GUI, helps us familiarize ourselves with the Android GUI and prepares us
to tackle every situation with no less than 19 different components.
Chapter 4, Using Android Resources, helps us make things look better by covering how to use
splash screen, manage multiscreen, play songs or videos, and display our application icon.
Chapter 5, Using On-Phone Data, takes a leap forward in order to persist and access user
data between different launches of our applications. To do so, you will learn about user
preferences, file writing/reading, SQLite, and LinQ.

Preface
Chapter 6, Populating Your GUI with Data, completes the loop between the on-phone data
of the previous chapter and the GUI of Chapter 4, Using Android Resources, by covering how
to populate GUI elements with data.
Chapter 7, Using Android Services, shows how to create, bound to, and identify running
Android services in order to pursue our application processes even when the users are not
looking at them.
Chapter 8, Mastering Intents A Walkthrough, covers how to switch back on forth between
applications with Android Intents to access a contact number or an address on the map,
for example.
Chapter 9, Playing with Advanced Graphics, will push forward the creation of advanced
graphics, such as 2D graphics, in our application and animation. We will also take advantage
of the Android API made available by Xamarin to use the camera.
Chapter 10, Taking Advantage of the Android Platform, brings the last piece to our GUI
building skills by mastering Android fragments that represent the behavior or a portion of the
user interface in an Activity.
Chapter 11, Using Hardware Interactions, guides us to interact with our phone's hardware,
such as NFC, Bluetooth, Accelerometer, and GPS.
Chapter 12, Debugging and Testing, leverages the debugging and testing capacities of
Xamarin Studio and the Android emulator.
Chapter 13, Monetizing and Publishing Your Applications, prepares us to build our final
application and publish it to the Android Play Store.
Appendix, Mono The Underlying Technology, exposes the key concepts about the technology
that makes Xamarin possible.

Getting Started
In this first chapter, we will learn how to install Xamarin Studio and the Xamarin plugin for
Microsoft Visual Studio and have a quick tour of both. Then we will move towards the creation
of our first Hello World application and get it running on the emulator. We will cover the
following topics:

Installing the Xamarin Suite

Building a HelloWorld App!

Introduction
Xamarin Studio is a cross-platform integrated development environment. It is works across
platforms in two ways: the IDE is available on Mac OS and Windows (no Linux support
announced), and it allows the development of software for Mac OS, iOS, and Android.
While its design can remind you of Xcode, the Apple IDE is only available to Mac owners,
Xamarin Studio offers stunning features. Indeed, this IDE allows users to discover the new
API easily through a powerful code completion enhanced by the ability to quickly learn about
the method and required types. The following screenshot provides an overview of this code
completion and the relevant documentation:

Getting Started
While being trained as a programmer, it seems that I have not developed any artistic
capabilities and certainly won't in future. This is quite a problem, and you've certainly
already faced an awkward situation like this: You: "Look at these amazing features!" Project
Manager/Client: "Meh. It is despicable; the colors don't match with each other. Could you try
this in light blue?".
Xamarin Studio, just like any modern IDE, allows the generation of user interfaces in a
WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interface. In this way, it is a tool not only for
programmers but also for designers. Using Xamarin Studio, you will build classy and beautiful
apps, while Visual Studio and Netbeans barely provide functioning interfaces. The following
screenshot shows the user interface menus and an example of such user interfaces:

Every programmer experienced with modern IDEs such as Visual Studio, XCode, and Eclipse
generally uses, on a daily basis, a step-by-step debugger. A debugger allows you to set
breakpoints to stop code execution and then walk inside the code, instruction by instruction,
while inspecting the values of variables. The step-by-step debugger included in Xamarin
Studio is really simple to use yet efficient. The best part about it is that it allows debugging in
the emulator (a virtual Android phone on your computer; we'll come back to this later) or on an
Android device, live. An example implying the introspection of a variable counting the number
of clicks on a button is shown in following screenshot:

Chapter 1

Among a long list of other really useful and entertaining features, Xamarin Studio also excels
in creating a highway to your customers' mobile devices. Indeed, publishing apps to the Play
Store (the Android market) has never been simpler. The packaging, deployment and shipment
to the Play Store processes are smoothly integrated inside Xamarin Studio as shown by the
follwoing screenshot:

Getting Started

A quick tour of Visual Studio

Visual Studio is the Microsoft IDE used to develop in any of the various languages that
comprise the Microsoft ecosystem. It can serve as an IDE for pretty much anything in
the Microsoft bosom, such as console and graphical interfaces, Windows Presentation
Foundation apps, websites, web applications, web services, Windows Mobile, and Windows
CE. Honestly, Visual Studio is an excellent IDE that could prove very useful after practicing
a little; thus, it comes with a price ranging from free to $13,299 depending on the version.
Nevertheless, the Xamarin Company has built a Visual Studio plugin that could definitively fit
your needs to develop an Android app if you own Visual Studio and are used to it. Xamarin
also costs from $999 to $1899 per platform, but it does have a free version that offers most
of the features covered in this book.
After talking about the financial aspect, let's focus on features. It turns out that all
Android-focused features are exactly the same and have to be used in the same ways in
almost the same menus. Choosing between Visual Studio versus Xamarin Studio will, in the
end, be a personal choice that we leave to the reader's discretion. However, Visual Studio
consumes a lot more resources than Xamarin Studio. Therefore, if you are not equipped with
good hardware, you should definitely go for Xamarin Studio.

Chapter 1
In the rest of this book, screenshots and paths will be based on Xamarin Studio, which
we believe is most used by newcomers to Android development (who use Xamarin and
C#). We will indicate Visual Studio paths and options when they are different from
those in Xamarin Studio.

Installing the Xamarin suite

In order to develop Android applications using C#, we have to set up our Android development
environment, and more specifically, we have to install Xamarin Suite. This first recipe will show
you how.

Getting ready
Xamarin Studio is available for the Mac and Windows operating systems and does not have
a set of minimum hardware requirement to match. However, the technologies embedded in
Xamarin Studio, such as the Android SDK, do have minimum requirements as follows:

Operating system:

Mac OS X 10.4.8 or later (x86 onlyIntel chips)

Hardware requirements:

Windows XP (32-bit), Vista (32- or 64-bit), 7 (32- or 64-bit),

8 (32- or 64-bit)

600 MB of available space and an additional 100MB per platform (iOS,

Android, Windows)
This is not official, but I recommend an i3-equivalent processor and 4 GB of
RAM to run Xamarin Studio and one emulator without any trouble.
Again, this is not official. In case of industrial needs, the debugging available
on a real Android phone, while not mandatory, will accelerate your production.
The phone cost is definitely worth it in terms of development time.

Software requirements:

In case you intend to use the Visual Studio plugin inside Xamarin Studio
Suite, you must own a license for Visual Studio 2010 or 2012 in a nonexpress edition.

Getting Started

How to do it...
In order to install Xamarin Studio, please follow the given steps:
1. Browse to http://xamarin.com/download, enter your information, and choose
your operating system.

2. Execute the XamarinInstaller.exe or XamarinInstaller.dmg file that

you subsequently receive and accept the terms and conditions by clicking
on Next.
3. Choose what you want to do with your Xamarin tool suite: Android or iOS or both.
4. Accept the directory in which the Android SDK will be downloaded and installed.

Chapter 1
5. For now, if you have checked everything, as we did, we should view the requirements
of Xamarin Installer. The title is a bit misleading. In reality, this is not a list of
requirements but of software that will be downloaded and installed during the
Xamarin Suite installation.

6. After a long period of downloading, the various software will install themselves on
your computer.

Getting Started
7.

The installation is completed. You can now open Xamarin Studio.

The displayed screenshots of these seven steps have been taken during installation on a
Windows 8 system. However, all the Windows installations are exactly the same. For Mac, the
only differences are graphical.

How it works...
Xamarin is based on the Mono Project (refer to the Appendix), which is an Open Source
implementation of the CLR (Common Language Runtime), but that does not explain how
Xamarin manages to create Android apps. Indeed, the Mono parts explain how we can execute
C# based applications on many platforms but not how these apps run on our Android devices.

Chapter 1
The Xamarin compiler, which is responsible for the transformation of C#.Net into Androidunderstandable code, is a very powerful tool. Indeed, it will compile and link all your C#.Net
codeusing proprietary technologies and processesdirectly into an APK file. APK (Android
Application Package) is the required format to deploy and install applications onto Android
devices. The deployed APK on the targeted Android device will take advantage of the Just
In Time (JIT) compilation. This compilation is a hybrid approach between the interpreted
language, where an interpreter translates the language to the underlying machine each time
we need it, and the compiled approach, where the whole code is compiled into a machine. The
interpreted approach loads at the speed of light but comes with poor runtime performance,
while the compiled approach loads very slowly but offers better performance. Hence, the JIT
strategy consists of translating code continuously, just as an interpreter does, but it saves the
translated code with a cache mechanism to avoid performance degradation. In other words, JIT
offers the best of both worlds. Last but not least, it runs natively on Android devices.
If you intend to use the Visual Studio plugin, here are the steps to verify that it has been
properly installed:
1. Run Visual Studio.

Getting Started
2. In the File menu search for New Project and select Visual C# in the
Other languages list. Finally, you can select and create a new Android Application
Project.

After clicking on the OK button, Visual Studio will open the Android Project perspective and a
new Android solution.

There's more...
Xamarin comes in two different versions: Business and Enterprise. The prices are $999, and
$1899 per platform (Android, iOS, and Mac OS) and per developer, respectively. It's quite an
investment, especially if you are on your ownunderstood to be "not sponsored by a company
that handles license-related fees"so it's mandatory to reduce your needs and buy the
adapted version.

10

Chapter 1
The starter (free) version will allow you to build very small apps that contain no more than 32
KB of compiled code. In other words, you will have the taste of Xamarin, but your applications
will stay very simpleforever. A less constraining limitation related to the free version is
the impossibility of invoking native third-party libraries such as P/Invoke. We can definitely
build a world-class app without third-party libraries; it just takes longer. The indie version
($299/platform/dev) only takes down the size limitation and will therefore meet the needs
of the majority. The two latest and more expensive versions will mainly provide support
from the Xamarin team. The Business version offers e-mail support, Visual Studio support,
and in-house deployment, while the Enterprise version will add $500 worth of ready-to-use
components for Xamarin Studio, a one-day SLA, hotfixes, a technical kick-off session, and
code troubleshooting provided by Xamarin engineers.
While many possibilities are offered to you, the Starter Edition should be enough to follow this
book. In case you want to determine whether or not a feature is worth its price, go for the trial
edition.

Testing the simulator

For both systems (Xamarin Studio and Visual Studio), we should determine whether or not
the simulator is well configured. If so, there is a good chance that our whole environment
is as well.
In Xamarin Studio:
1. Go to the Emulator menu via the Project menu | Android Device Target | Manage
Devices. The following window appears:

11

Getting Started
The different versions of MonoForAndroidwhich could be
referred to as MonoDroid informallytarget the different
versions of Android. The newer (higher) versions are made for
the latest Android releases.

2. Select the higher version (API_21, which targets Android 4.0.3, at the time of writing
November 2015) and click on Start Simulator. After a while, especially on the first
start, the simulator will show up. It can be used exactly as an Android Phone.

12

Chapter 1
In Visual Studio:
1. Access the Simulator menu via the Tool menu and then start Android Emulator
Manager. The following window appears:

2. Select the higher version and click on Start. As with Xamarin Studio, the simulator
can be used as an Android Phone.
After pressing the Start button, the Android emulator will start. This operation may take a
few moments depending on your hardware. Nevertheless, after a moment, the emulator will
provide a user experience really close to that of a real Android device.

13

Getting Started

Connecting Xamarin Studio and Visual Studio to a versioning

control system
A good habit you should always have is to work with a versioning control system, no matter the
size of the project. The integration of git/svn into Xamarin Studio comes off without a hitch.
You just have to browse the Version Control menu and then press the Checkout button.

Unfortunately, Visual Studio does not offer any embedded support for git or svn, we
recommend giving libgit2 and visualsvn, respectively, a try.

14

Chapter 1

Using another Android SDK

If you already are into Android development you might need, in a particular configuration
such as maintaining an application on enterprise devices that are not up-to-date (for security
reasons), to use a different Android SDK than the one installed with Xamarin Studio. To do so,
browse the Tool menu in Xamarin Studio and then press the Option button. In the new window
that comes up, search for Android under SDK Locations in the Projects section. The same
menu exists in Visual Studio under Tools | Options | Xamarin | Android Settings.

Pay attention while modifying these parameters. Indeed, any misconfiguration will prevent
your Xamarin Studio from running any Android applications.

15

Getting Started

See also

See also the next recipe for the very first hands-on tutorial on Xamarin Studio.

Building a Hello World App!

It's now time to get our hands dirty and write some simple code by ourselves to output the
famous Hello World message. In this recipe, we will create a new Android project in Xamarin
Studio. This project will lead to an Android app that outputs Hello World! after pressing on a
Say Hello! button. This first application will run in the simulator and on a real Android Device.
Moreover, this application will allow us to discover the architecture of an Android project, the
same as its specificities.

Getting ready
For this recipe, we will need to have successfully installed the Xamarin Studio tool suite and
run the emulator at least once in order to confirm that everything is working well.

How to do it...
1. Run Xamarin Studio, browse the File menu, and then click on New Solution. In the
new window that comes up, select Android Application under C# | Android.

16

Chapter 1
2. Make sure that Create directory for solution is checked.
3. Name your project Hello_World and press OK.
Note that the project name only accepts the letters A-Z, the digits 0-9
and the hyphen (-), underscore (_), and period (.) characters. This is
the reason for the underscore between "Hello" and "World".

Now that you have a new project named Hello_World, it's appropriate to take some time to
explain the files and folders comprising the architecture of an Android project. The project you
have just created is already filled with a large number of files and folders.

By order of appearance, the first folder is named References and contains four
libraries Mono.Android, System, System.core, and System.XML. This folder
will contain all libraries that you used in your project in the same way as a pure .Net
project.

The next folder, named Components, contains components that you previously
developed for Xamarin or downloaded from the rich Xamarin database. Most of
the components directly available from the Xamarin Component Store are free and
ready-to-use components that will add commonly needed functionality to your project,
ranging from interacting with Facebook to including Easter eggs in your applications.

The two following folders are Assets and Resources, just like in native Android
apps. They are pretty similar however, in the sense that they contain files that are
not code, for example, images, songs, XML files, and pretty much anything your
application will need. So why do we have two folders if they have the same purposes?
In reality, the external files placed in the Assets folder will be easily accessible at
runtime by using the Asset Manager (we'll come back to this later), while for the ones
contained in the Resources folder, you will have to declare and maintain a list of
resource IDs that you might use at runtime. In general use, we will put all images,
sounds, icons, and other external files in the Resources folder, and the Assets
folder will be privileged for dictionaries and XML storage.

The next folder in line is named Properties and contains two files:
AndroidManifest.xml and AssymblyInfo.cs. They are responsible for the
Android version and permission your application targets, and your project information
(such as the version and build number), respectively.

17

Getting Started

Finally, the MainActivity.cs file is the main class of our application; it contains
our very first Android apps lines of code.

4. Open the Main.axml file in the Layout folder under Resources. A new file
containing the graphical interface of your Hello World! app should appear.
The .axml file is, in fact, an XML file that allows code completion
in Xamarin Studio and Visual Studio for graphical element. It also
defines the position and properties of the graphical element.

18

Chapter 1
5. Double-click on the button on the graphical interface and change the text to
Say Hello!

6. From the ToolBox pane, on the right of both Xamarin Studio and Visual Studio, locate
Text (Large) in the Widgets section.
7.

Drag and drop the Text (Large) widget below the Say Hello button.

8. Double-click on the Text (Large) widget you just inserted and delete the text.
9. With the Text (Large) widget selected, locate the Properties pane in the bottom-right
corner of the IDE and change the Id tag style from @+id/textView1 to @+id/
myTextView.

The Id tag style is the unique identifier of the graphic element. You
will use these IDs in the C# code in order to manipulate the graphical
elements. Therefore, you must give them meaningful names.

19

Getting Started
10. Return to the MainActivity.cs file and locate Button button =
FindViewById<Button> (Resource.Id.myButton);. Add these lines of code
below it:
// Get our TextView from the layout resource, and attach an
event to it
TextView view = FindViewById<TextView>
(Resource.Id.myTextView);

11. Locate the following lines of code:

button.Click += delegate {
button.Text = string.Format ("{0} clicks!", count++);
};

Modify them as follows:

button.Click += delegate {
view.Text = "Hello World !";
};

12. Delete the code int count = 1; in the 14th line.

13. Browse the Project menu, then click on Manage Devices under the Android
Device Target submenu.
14. Locate the MonoForAndroid_API_15 emulator, select it, and click on Start Emulator.
You will always need to have an emulator started prior to
launching your project as the project requires a device or
an emulator to execute on.

15. Run your Hello_World project by pressing the

button in the top-left corner of
Xamarin Studio. After a moment, your application will be pushed on the emulator
and executed.

20

Chapter 1
16. Here we go! Our very first Android application is now running on the Android emulator.
You can press the Say Hello! button and Hello World! will appear.

How it works...
The How it works section of our Hello World recipe could appear rudimentary if you already
have some graphical user interface development experience with C#. However, mastering the
basics is never superfluous.
For this code example, and all the following one throughout this book, we will display
the whole piece of code, add some references to it, and then explain the code using the
references.
using
using
using
using
using
using
using

System;
Android.App;
Android.Content;
Android.Runtime;
Android.Views;
Android.Widget;
Android.OS;

namespace Hello_World {

[1]

[2]

[Activity (Label = "Hello_World", MainLauncher = true)]

public class MainActivity : Activity {
protected override void OnCreate (Bundle bundle) {
base.OnCreate (bundle);
// Set our view from the "main" layout resource
21

Getting Started
SetContentView (Resource.Layout.Main);

[3]

// Get our button from the layout resource,

// and attach an event to it
Button button = FindViewById<Button>
(Resource.Id.myButton);
[4]
// Get our TextView from the layout resource,
// and attach an event to it
TextView view = FindViewById<TextView>
(Resource.Id.myTextView);
[5]
button.Click += delegate {
view.Text = "Hello World !";
};

[6]

}
}
}

Here is an explanation of Hello World MainActivity.cs:

[1]: Most of the C# applications and in general .Net applications files start by using
directives. Using directives, enlist all the namespaces that your application will use
on a frequent basis, saving you time. For example, the TextView class is inside the
namespace Android.Widget, and without the corresponding directive, you will have
to type Android.Widget.TextView each time you want to create such objects.

[2]: C# also enables the creation of programmer-defined namespaces. Each class

in that namespace will be visible without any need to specify using Hello_World.
Moreover, you could refer to your Hello_World namespace in other namespaces
and have access to your classes.

[3]: Our layout is defined by the Main.axml file in the Resources/Layout

folder. We therefore need to bind this file to the screen. To do so, we call the
SetContentView() method.

[4-5]: In the fourth and fifth instruction sets, we create a Button and a TextView
instance by using the FindViewById constructor. This generic class enables the
creation of graphical elements by using their IDs. These IDs are user defined at the
creation of these elements.

[6]: delegate is a method signature type, and it's the keystone of event
programming in C#. Here we are facing an inline delegate instance, which
introduces an anonymous method in reality. This method (view.Text = "Hello
World !";) will be executed on the button.Click event by means of the += which
add this new behavior at the end of the existing ones.

22

Chapter 1

There's more...
Let's have a look at the following sections in order to learn about testing on a physical device
and checkout this book's free source code.

Testing on a physical device

Testing your applications on physical devices will save you a lot of time, as the simulators
are rather slow. You can see the complete procedure to do so, depending on your system,
at http://developer.xamarin.com/guides/android/getting_started/
installation/set_up_device_for_development/.

Source code
This book comes with a lot of code examples that are freely available from Github. The code
for this first chapter can be found here:
https://github.com/MathieuNls/mastering-xamarin-studio/

For the following chapters, adapt the following URL:

https://github.com/MathieuNls/mastering-xamarin-studio/tree/master/
chap1.
In order to access all the codes given in the book, replace the end
of the URL from chap1 to chap2 for Chapter 2 and so on.

See also

The next chapter introduces Android Activities Lifecycle. It will show you how your
application lives and dies.

23

Get more information Xamarin Studio for Android Programming: A C#

Cookbook

Where to buy this book

You can buy Xamarin Studio for Android Programming: A C# Cookbook from the
Packt Publishing website.
Alternatively, you can buy the book from Amazon, BN.com, Computer Manuals and most internet
book retailers.
Click here for ordering and shipping details.

www.PacktPub.com

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