One of the wonderful things about .NET is the vast array of platforms .NET developers can target. My personal experience has been developing ASP.NET applications and HTTP APIs, but recently I’ve been dabbling with mobile applications built using Rider and Xamarin.Forms.
For those curious, or maybe even a little scared, about working with Xamarin.Forms, well, don’t be. I’ve found the Xamarin.Forms community to be welcoming and very helpful to a mobile newbie like me. I’ve also found the platform itself to be straightforward to get started and iterate on as I’ve learned new approaches to solving the same problems.
Before continuing, I recommend reading Maarten’s post, Developing Xamarin applications in Rider, which will help in setting up your Xamarin.Forms development environment. We’ll also need .NET Core 3.1 SDK or higher installed. An important note is that while it’s possible to develop iOS applications on Windows, I recommend doing so on macOS. Since this is a Xamarin.Forms application, readers are welcome to create the app for Android, iOS, or both.
In this post, we’ll be creating a Moon Phase app. The app allows the user to determine the moon’s phase and its appearance by entering a date/time and the user’s current hemisphere. To get in the space mindset, be sure to set your theme to dark mode, like I did.
For those interested in the final results, you can head over to the GitHub repository.