Vincent Maverick S. Durano

Understanding Game Application DevelopmentWith Xamarin.Forms and ASP.NET

Vincent Maverick S. Durano

Minnetonka, MN, USA

Any source code or other supplementary material referenced by the author in this book is available to readers on GitHub via the book’s product page, located at www.​apress.​com/​978-1-4842-4263-6 . For more detailed information, please visit http://​www.​apress.​com/​source-code .

ISBN 978-1-4842-4263-6e-ISBN 978-1-4842-4264-3

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-4264-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018966347

© Vincent Maverick S. Durano 2019

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I dedicate this book to my kids: Vianne Maverich Durano and Vynn Markus Durano.

To my wife, Michelle Anne, who’s always accepted me as I am and supported my hustle, drive, and ambition: you are and always will be my perfect wife and mother to our children. I love you!

To my mom, Lilibeth: There are no words that can express how I feel, and I’ll always thank the Lord you made me. I love you, Mom. You are appreciated.

To my Aunt Veronica and my grandparents, Papa Daddy and Mama Nieves: There’s NO way I can pay you back, and I’ll never fully understand, but I want you to know YOU raised a good man.

To my sister, Angel Cristine, and to the rest of my family back in the Philippines: Thank you so much for being supportive.

To all my friends, especially Daniel De Leon: Thank you for being supportive. I truly appreciate all your kindness.

Finally, to all my article readers and followers: Thank you so much for your support and for giving me the motivation to contribute more in the technical community. You all are my energy to keep me going. Thank you!

Introduction

Technologies are constantly evolving, and as .NET developers we need to cope with the latest or at least with what’s popular nowadays. At the beginning, you might find yourself having a hard time catching up with the latest technologies due to confusion about what sets of technologies to use and where to start. There are tons of resources out there that you can use as a reference to learn, but you still find it hard to connect the dots in the picture. Sometimes you might even think of losing the interest to learn and giving up. If you are confused and have no idea how to start building an iOS or Android mobile application from scratch and how to connect your app with your database and API, then this book is for you.

Keep in mind that this book highlights only the basic implementation of a mind/memory game type of mobile application. If you are looking for an action, adventure, card, RPG, or sports type of game app development, then this book is not for you.

Understanding Game Development with Xamarin.Forms and ASP.NET will walk you through how to build a simple data-driven mobile game application using the power of Xamarin.Forms and Web API. We will also build a real-time leaderboard page using ASP.NET MVC and SignalR.

This book covers topics from creating a SQL database from scratch, to building the Web API endpoints, to making a mobile application that targets both iOS and Android, to building a real-time leaderboard page for player rankings, deployment, and testing, and finally down to publishing your code to GitHub.

The goal of this book is to guide .NET developers who might become interested in mobile application development if they discover the need for a simple working game application that requires some kind of feature that connects data from a mobile app to other services such as a REST application or a web application.

This book is targeted for beginners to intermediate .NET developers who want to jump into mobile application development with Xamarin and get their hands dirty with practical examples.

I’ve written this book so that it’s easy to follow and understand by providing step-by-step processes with as many detailed code explanations as possible. As you go along to the end of the book, you will learn the basic concepts and fundamentals of each of the technologies used for building the whole application and how they connect to each other.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1:​ Introduction 1

Roadmap 2

Chapter 1 2

Chapter 2 3

Chapter 3 3

Chapter 4 3

Chapter 5 4

Chapter 6 4

Chapter 7 4

Background 4

What You Will Learn 6

Prerequisites 7

Development Tools Download Resources 8

Windows 8

Mac 9

Installation Guide 9

Visual Studio 2017 9

SQL Server 2017 13

Five Players, One Goal 20

Xamarin.​Forms 20

ASP.​NET Web API 21

EF 22

ASP.​NET MVC 23

ASP.​NET SignalR 23

Wrap-Up 24

Chapter 2:​ Getting Started 27

Application Flow 27

Mobile Application Process Flow 28

Web API Server Process Flow 29

Web Application Process Flow 30

Game Overview 30

Mechanics 30

Objective 31

Mobile Application Views 32

Welcome Screen 32

Registration Screen 33

Main Screen 34

Result Screen 35

Web Application View 38

Creating the Core Projects for Mobile App 39

Overview and Anatomy 43

MemoryGame.​App 43

MemoryGame.​App.​Android 44

MemoryGame.​App.​iOS 45

Architecture Fundamentals 46

First Run 47

Xamarin.​Android 49

Xamarin.​iOS 51

The Required NuGet Packages 60

Chapter 3:​ Configuring Data Access and API Endpoints 63

Creating a New Empty Database 63

Creating the ASP.​NET Web API Project 67

Integrating EF 71

What Is an ORM?​ 71

What is EF?​ 72

Setting Up a Data Access Layer 73

Implementing CRUD Operations 79

A Friendly Reminder 96

The Web API Endpoints 96

Enabling CORS 104

Sample cURLs 106

Testing with Postman 108

Chapter 4:​ Building Mobile Application with Xamarin.​Forms 111

Implementing the Service Interfaces 112

The IHaptic Interface 112

The ILocalDataStore Interface 113

The ISound Interface 114

The Helper Class 115

The Settings Class 116

The DTO Class 119

The GameAPI Class 120

Async and Await Overview 124

Method Definitions 125

The PlayerManager Class 131

Adding the Needed Graphics and Sound File 141

Android 141

iOS 142

The Required XAML Pages 143

The Register Page 144

The Home Page 160

The Result Page 181

Setting the Page Navigation 189

Summary of Files Added 191

Implementing the Haptic and Sound Services 192

Xamarin.​Android Haptic Service 192

Xamarin.​Android Sound Service 193

Xamarin.​iOS Haptic Service 194

Xamarin.​iOS Sound Service 195

Setting Permissions 197

Xamarin.​Android 197

Xamarin.​iOS 198

Chapter 5:​ Building a Simple Real-Time Leaderboard Web App with ASP.​NET SignalR and MVC 201

What ASP.​NET MVC Is 201

The Model 203

The Controller 203

The View 203

What ASP.​NET SignalR Is 204

Transport Protocols Selection 205

Transport Protocol Overview 206

Create a New Web Application 208

Integrating ASP.​NET SignalR 209

Adding a Middleware for SignalR 211

Adding a Hub 211

Adding an API Endpoint 214

Configure Web API Routing 217

Enabling API Endpoint-to-Endpoint Communication 218

Adding an MVC Controller 220

Adding a View 221

Output 225

Chapter 6:​ Deployment and Testing 227

Using the Conveyor Plug-in for Visual Studio 2017 228

What Is Conveyor?​ 228

Install Conveyor 229

Using SharpProxy 235

Simulating the Application’s Process 238

Android 240

iOS 241

Next Steps 241

Output 242

Chapter 7:​ Pushing Your Code to GitHub 243

Using Visual Studio to Push Source Code in GitHub 244

Download GitHub Extension for Visual Studio 245

GitHub Repository and Source Code 258

References 259

Index 263

About the Author and About the Technical Reviewers

About the Author

Vincent Maverick S. Durano

is a proud Cebuano. He’s originally from the Philippines and now works as a Solutions Architect / Senior Software Engineer in a research and development company based in USA, focusing mainly on web and mobile technologies. He is a nine-time Microsoft MVP, three-time C# Corner MVP, CodeProject MVP, Microsoft Influencer, DZone MVB, and a regular contributor at CodeProject, CsharpCorner, Microsoft TechNet Wiki, AspSnippets, and Xamarin. He also contributes at the official Microsoft ASP.NET community site, where he became one of the all-time top answerers with All-Star recognition level (the highest attainable level).

He has authored e-books for C# Corner, including GridView Control Pocket Guide , Dockerizing ASP.NET Core and Blazor Applications on Mac and ASP.NET MVC 5: A Beginner’s Guide , and is now working on a new book entitled ASP.NET Core 2: A Beginner’s Guide .

He runs a blog at http://vmsdurano.com and has created a few open source projects that are hosted on Codeplex and GitHub. He also developed the VMD.RESTApiResponseWrapper.Core and VMD.RESTApiResponseWrapper.Net NuGet packages.

 

About the Technical Reviewers

Afzaal Ahmad Zeeshan

is a computer programmer from Rabwah, Pakistan; he likes .NET Core for regular day development and has experience with Cloud, Mobile, and API development. Afzaal Ahmad has experience with the Azure platform and likes to build cross-platform libraries/software with .NET Core. He has been recognized as a Microsoft MVP for his work in the field of software development and as a CodeProject MVP and C# Corner MVP for technical writing and mentoring.

 

Syed Shanu

is a three-time Microsoft MVP, a four-time C# Corner MVP, and a four-time Code project MVP. Shanu is also an author, blogger, and speaker. He’s from Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India, and works as Technical Lead in South Korea. With more than 11 years of experience with Microsoft technologies, Shanu is an active person in the community and is always happy to share his knowledge on topics related to ASP.​NET , MVC, ASP.​NET Core, Web API, SQL Server, Angular, and ASP.​NET Core Blazor, among others. He has written more than 100 articles on various technologies. He’s also a several-time TechNet Guru Gold Winner. Follow him on Twitter @syedshanu3.