On March 22, 2018, Syncfusion hosted the webinar, “How to Build a Xamarin App with Only Two Controls,” presented by Aaron Melamed, Syncfusion’s product solutions specialist. Melamed demonstrated how to set up a new Xamarin application from scratch using the Syncfusion navigation drawer and list view controls. The following blog post is the Q&A portion of the webinar. A recording of the webinar can be found on our YouTube page , or you can watch here:
Q: We use Prism navigation and have a navigation drawer on every page. Is that the correct way to use it? Or should we have only one page with a navigation drawer and exchange the NavigationDrawer.Content?
A: Currently, navigation drawer is a view. We are investigating the feasibility of providing it as a page so that we can utilize Prism navigation.
Q: Can ItemTapped be used with commands?
A: We don’t have a command property for an ItemTapped event, but you can use “Event to Command Behavior” to execute the command.
Q: Will this sample be available for download?
A: As this is a project built from scratch, there won’t be any downloadable code since you can just follow along.
Q: In Xamarin, is the model MVC is available? For example, web apps (ASP.NET MVC).
A: Xamarin.Forms framework is specifically designed to work with MVVM pattern so that you can leverage the features like data binding to have clean separation between your view model and the UI.
Q: Where do you store the images for the list view?
A: The images used in the demo were loaded on demand from the web and displayed using an image control in the list view’s item template, so they were not stored anywhere.
Q: Do you have tab controls instead of a hamburger menu?
A: Yes, we now have a tab view control for Xamarin.Forms. You can learn more about it here: https://help.syncfusion.com/xamarin/tabbed-view/overview
Q: Do these controls work with Xamarin Live Player?
A: Due to the limitations in Xamarin Live Player when using reflection and certain classes, custom controls do not work in Live Player as it depends on these features. Our controls will work once this is fixed by Xamarin.
Q: I looked on the help.syncfusion.com site and I didn’t see anything about changing the NuGet channel from nuget.org to a Syncfusion channel. Can you repeat why/how to do so, please?
A: It’s not necessary to do so. In the presentation it was done just to ensure we only saw Syncfusion controls in the search results.
Q: Will the new tab control show at the top on Android and bottom on iOS by default?
A: By default, tab view renders the tabs at the top. However, you can position them differently in each OS.
Q: What would you recommend to store/pull images from users (e.g., Facebook users) and display them in a list view: where would you store them for fast pulling?
A: It’s recommended to implement an image caching framework.
Q: Do you have radar charts?
A: Yes, we do. You can find a list of our currently supported chart types here: https://help.syncfusion.com/xamarin/charts/charttypes.
