In this chapter, we will develop a sample app similar to NationalParks.iOS from the last chapter using Xamarin.Android. This chapter covers the following topics:
- Overview of the sample app
- Creating a Xamarin.Android app
- Editing Android layout files with Xamarin Studio
- Running and debugging apps with Xamarin Studio
- Running and debugging apps with Visual Studio
- Inspecting compile-time generated elements of a Xamarin.Android app
The sample app we will create in this chapter follows the same basic design as the NationalParks.iOS app from the previous chapter. To review the screen mockups and general description you can refer to the The sample national parks app section in Chapter 4, Developing Your First iOS App with Xamarin.iOS. The following screenshots show the Android screens from the provided solution:
There is one design change we will introduce in the Android version of the app; we will create a singleton class to help manage loading and saving parks to a JSON-formatted file. This will be discussed further when we start building the singleton class in an upcoming section, Creating the NationalParksData singleton.