Welcome to Crosslight Getting Started. If you're just starting out with Crosslight, this is the right place to get your hands dirty and start building great cross-platform mobile apps.

Crosslight is designed with advanced architecture featuring a wealth of APIs and extensions that promote clear separation-of-concern for maximum reusability, scalability and maintainability. But you don't need to worry about these architectural concepts for now. Just focus on completing the three walkthroughs below to jump start with Crosslight development, you will learn the concept along the way.

1. Walkthrough: Creating Your First Crosslight App or Walkthrough: Creating New Project with Crosslight Project Wizard.
   Tips: Choose the first option if you prefer to start from a blank Xamarin solution. Optionally, choose the latter to have Project Wizard creates a new Crosslight solution for you.
2. Walkthrough: Creating a Simple Tip Calculator
3. Walkthrough: Performing Navigation

Congratulations!

Now that you have completed the three essential walkthroughs above, you have gained basic Crosslight skills required to move forward. In general, you should have learnt the following:

• Understand the anatomy of a Crosslight solution which comprises of a Core Portable project and platform-specific projects specifically iOS and Android Material, and optionally Windows projects.
• Understand how Crosslight projects manage its references through Crosslight NuGet packages.
• Understand how Crosslight works through data binding between View and ViewModel, particularly these primary building blocks:
  • ViewModel – represents your application and UI logic
  • BindingProvider – establishes a two-way connection between View and ViewModel
  • View – represents the view context which generally contain only interface definition, i.e., ViewController in iOS, Fragment in Android.
  • Services – represents services consumable in ViewModel that provide additional functionality to Crosslight, i.e., NavigationService, MobileService.
• Using navigation service to navigate around different views, either with push or modal navigation.
• Defining commands in ViewModel to respond to a user action, i.e., a button tap.
• Creating view contexts for iOS 9 and Android Material projects, and able to run iOS and Android Material projects in simulators.

Next Steps

With the essential Crosslight knowledge, you're ready to embark further into Crosslight universe which offers everything you need to build great mobile apps. Next, discover what Crosslight has to offer by exploring the samples that suit the most to your interest below. All samples are designed with download – run – it just works philosophy, so you can get started and inspired in just a moment.