Under the hood

As previously mentioned, Xamarin, being a cross-platform development framework, provides developers the toolset to create applications that depend on and use the same code base. The shared amount of code is directly proportional to the manageability in these types of implementation.

Xamarin.Forms adds an abstraction layer on top of the mono runtime on Android and the pre-compiler .NET stack on iOS platforms. This abstraction layer's sole responsibility is to provide the Xamarin compilers with the necessary instructions to normalize the code or markup for GUI elements to render native controls in Xamarin apps. Since the platform language for Xamarin is C#, Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) is the design markup language of choice. Xamarin.Forms provides the same abstraction as a runtime library for Windows Store applications.

The abstraction layer provided by Xamarin.Forms makes use of the similar UI elements and layout patterns which were illustrated in the previous...