Skip to main content

Xamarin 2.0: bringing cross-platform development to the next level

Xamarin brought cross-platform mobile development to the next level. With the announcement of Xamarin 2.0 comes a rebranding of their products, a new IDE called Xamarin Studio, a Visual Studio add-in for iOS development, and the introduction of a component store.

Xamarin Studio

Xamarin Studio is the successor of MonoDevelop. It has a new interface and provides some of the functionality familiar to Visual Studio developers: auto-completion, refactoring, syntax highlighting, code tooltips, code navigation, integrated debugger for simulator/emulator or the real device, integration with Git and Subversion. Don’t forget to have a look at ‘the making of’.

Visual Studio Add-in for iOS development

Xamarin offered the option to do iOS development before, but you couldn’t use Visual Studio and had to switch to MonoDevelop(which was a great IDE by the way). Now Xamarin fixed this by releasing a Visual Studio add-in for iOS development. This add-in offers good integration with Microsoft’s ecosystem including remote debugging and testing in a simulator on a Mac OS machine(so you still need a Mac OS machine to test your application).

Component Store

The last new feature that Xamarin 2.0 introduces is the Component Store. Xamarin has built a framework for creating, sharing and reusing components directly from the IDE increasing the development speed.The store offers ready-to-use mobile themes, Xamarin.Mobile providing an API for accessing common platform features, and much more…

Have a look at http://components.xamarin.com/.

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME         ...
Read more

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.
Read more

VS Code Planning mode

After the introduction of Plan mode in Visual Studio , it now also found its way into VS Code. Planning mode, or as I like to call it 'Hannibal mode', extends GitHub Copilot's Agent Mode capabilities to handle larger, multi-step coding tasks with a structured approach. Instead of jumping straight into code generation, Planning mode creates a detailed execution plan. If you want more details, have a look at my previous post . Putting plan mode into action VS Code takes a different approach compared to Visual Studio when using plan mode. Instead of a configuration setting that you can activate but have limited control over, planning is available as a separate chat mode/agent: I like this approach better than how Visual Studio does it as you have explicit control when plan mode is activated. Instead of immediately diving into execution, the plan agent creates a plan and asks some follow up questions: You can further edit the plan by clicking on ‘Open in Editor’: ...
Read more