You're reading from .NET MAUI Projects - Third Edition

Product typeBook

Published inFeb 2024

Reading LevelN/a

PublisherPackt

ISBN-139781837634910

Edition3rd Edition

Languages

Tools

.NET MAUI

Concepts

Mobile Game Development

Authors (3):

Michael Cummings

Daniel Hindrikes

Johan Karlsson

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Building a Photo Gallery App Using CollectionView and CarouselView

In this chapter, we will build an app that shows photos from the camera roll (photo gallery) of a user’s device. The user will also be able to select photos as favorites. We will then look at the different ways to display photos—in carousels and in multi-column grid control. By using the .NET MAUI CarouselView control to display a group of images, the user can swipe through them to view each image. To display a large group of images, we will use the .NET MAUI CollectionView control and vertical scrolling to allow the user to view all the images. By learning how to use these controls, we will be able to use them in a lot of other cases when we build real-world apps.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

Requesting permissions from the user to access data
How to import photos from the iOS and Mac Catalyst photo gallery
How to import photos from the Android photo gallery...

Technical requirements

To be able to complete this project, you will need to have Visual Studio for Mac or Windows installed, as well as the necessary .NET MAUI workloads. See Chapter 1, Introduction to .NET MAUI, for more details on how to set up your environment.

To build an iOS app using Visual Studio for your PC, you have to have a Macintosh (Mac) device connected. If you don’t have access to a Mac at all, you can just follow the Android and Windows part of this project.

You can find the full source for the code in this chapter at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/MAUI-Projects-3rd-Edition/.

Project overview

Almost all apps visualize collections of data, and in this chapter, we will focus on two of the .NET MAUI controls that can be used to display data collections—CollectionView and CarouselView. Our app will show the photos that users have on their devices; to do that, we need to create a photo importer for each platform—one for iOS and Mac Catalyst, one for Windows, and one for Android.

The build time for this project is about 60 minutes.

Building the photo gallery app

This project, like all the rest, is a File | New | Project...-style project, which means that we will not be importing any code at all. So, this first section is all about creating the project and setting up the basic project structure .

It’s time to start building the app using the following steps. Let’s begin!

Creating the new project

The first step is to create a new .NET MAUI project:

Open Visual Studio 2022 and select Create a new project:

Figure 6.1 – Visual Studio 2022

This will open the Create a new project wizard.

In the search field, type in maui and select the .NET MAUI App item from the list:

Figure 6.2 – Create a new project

Click Next.
Complete the next step of the wizard by naming your project. We will be calling our application GalleryApp in this case. Move on to the next dialog box by clicking Next, as shown...

Summary

In this chapter, we focused on photos. We learned how to import photos from the platform-specific photo galleries and how we can display them as a grid using CollectionView and in carousels using CarouselView. This makes it possible for us to build other apps and provides multiple options for presenting data to users, as we can now pick the best method for the situation.

Additionally, we learned about permissions and how to check and request permission to use protected resources in our app.

If you are interested in extending the app even further, try creating a page to view the details of the photo, or to view the photo in full screen by tapping on the photo.

In the next chapter, we will build an app using location services and look at how to visualize location data on a map.

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Authors (3)

Michael Cummings

Michael Cummings is a Senior Development Engineer with Microsoft. He currently works on the Visual Studio tooling for building WPF, Xamarin.Forms, and .NET MAUI apps. He has experience as a developer and architect with concentrations in app development, design, deployment, and business process as it relates to technology. Michael has been a graphics and game programmer since the days of the TI99-4/A. He started the Boston XNA Developers Group. He has contributed to many open-source projects, including AXIOM, a .NET/Mono 3D rendering engine, and Planeshift, a 3D MMORPG. Michael also has experience with native game and graphics development (C++/DirectX) on Windows. Michael lives in Lexington, MA with his wife and their dog. When not working with technology he enjoys watching movies, trying out new recipes, and the occasional game of full-contact racquetball.
Read more about Michael Cummings

Daniel Hindrikes

Daniel Hindrikes is a developer and architect with a passion for developing mobile apps powered by the cloud. Daniel fell in love with Xamarin in the early days of Xamarin when he realized that he could use C# even for iOS and Android apps, and that he could share code with the Windows apps he was also building. But Daniel started to build mobile apps long before that, working on Android apps with Java and even Java ME apps (a long, long time ago). Daniel enjoys sharing his knowledge and can be found speaking at conferences, blogging, or recording the podcast, The Code Behind. Daniel works at the company tretton37 in Sweden and has experience working with both local and global customers.
Read more about Daniel Hindrikes

Johan Karlsson

Johan Karlsson has been working with Xamarin since the days of MonoTouch and Mono for Android, and it all started with writing a game. He is a full-stack developer, currently focusing on mobile applications using Xamarin, but has in the past worked a lot with ASP.NET MVC, Visual Basic.NET (not proud), and C# in general. Also, he's created a whole bunch of databases in SQL Server over the years. Johan works at tretton37 in Sweden and has about 20 years' experience in the trade of assembling ones and zeros.
Read more about Johan Karlsson

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