Not so long ago, the
Microsoft Build 2018 conference was held. This is great news for developers working with Microsoft products and technologies, including Xamarin. For those who followed the events from home, we collected all the announcements and announcements made at the conference. Under the cat you will find news regarding Xamarin, which we are sure will please the developers.
What did you like most and what was not enough?
Announcements on devices and tools for developers
Announcements on cloud and bots
Hyper-V Android Emulator Support
We announced the release of the
trial version of Google Android Android emulator , compatible with Hyper-V in the
April 2018 Windows
Update . To accomplish this, the Windows Hyper-V and Xamarin development teams have done an amazing job. The new feature allows developers to use the hardware-accelerated Android emulator together with other Hyper-V-based technologies, including Hyper-V virtual machines, Docker tools, HoloLens emulator, etc. Now every Android developer on Windows can use the fast Android emulator, which will always support the latest API of this system and will be able to work with Google Play services without additional configuration.
For more information about setting up an emulator in Hyper-V, as well as a list of known issues, please refer to
our documentation .
Xamarin.Forms 3.0
We are pleased to release a
stable version of Xamarin.Forms 3.0 . The new version allows for more flexible configuration of layouts and styling, and includes features such as Visual State Manager, Flex Layout, style sheets and support for streamlining from right to left. Also, the new build includes several bug fixes and awesome community ideas, so be sure to check out the
full list of changes . The fantastic improvements that span the entire Xamarin technology stack make this release the fastest and most feature-rich today!
Visual Studio Tools for Xamarin
Xamarin.Forms XAML IntelliSense
Xamarin.Forms developers using Visual Studio 2017 version 15.7 will notice how much
more convenient it has become to use IntelliSense . This feature now works on the same IntelliSense engine as WPF and UWP, thanks to which several improvements have been made, including improved mapping, binding / command completion, resource completion, fix patch extension completion. The engine also improved the recommendation system, code navigation and static analysis.
Automatic provision of iOS devices
To make life as easy as possible for developers, we are releasing the function of
automatically providing iOS devices in Visual Studio 2017 version 15.7. This feature simplifies the procedures for requesting a design certificate when creating a signing key, adding a device to the Developer Center, and creating a provisioning profile. All this can be done in Visual Studio.
Improved Android SDK Management
Determining which Android SDKs need to be installed for development can take a lot of time, so we added a new Android Manager SDK, thanks to which you no longer have to guess. The Android project may require to compile a version of the SDK that you do not have. In this case, when you open this project, you will receive a notification that will help you download and install the desired SDK package in the background. This feature is disabled by default, but you can easily enable it by going to
Tools → Options → Xamarin → Android settings → Enable automatic installation of Android SDK.Updated project templates for iOS and Android
Project templates are an important part of the application creation process, so we redesigned and reorganized
our native project templates for iOS and Android to make them easier to find under the menu File → New window. We also added templates for new Android features, such as pop-up menus and lower tabs, so you can create even more modern applications faster.
Platform Improvements
Xamarin.Android
We started distributing the Android Oreo SDK (Android API Level 27), Android SDK Tools 26 and
Xamarin Device Manager for Android in Visual Studio 2017 and Visual Studio for Mac. In addition, in Visual Studio 2017 you will notice that the waiting time for your application to appear on the screen has decreased. This comes at the expense of deploying the Xamarin runtime on your device or emulator while compiling the application.
Xamarin.iOS
Our iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS applications are now completely based on static types, which has the following advantages:
- Fewer applications. The compiled Xamarin.iOS.dll file is 30–50% smaller because the information (for example, custom attributes) that is needed only during assembly can now be deleted. It also allows the linker to remove more code than before, since fewer references to the code are made.
- Faster application launch. More registration work is performed at build time, rather than in the runtime environment. There is no need to use reflection (rather slow) on user attributes for registering types and methods.
- Less memory consumption. Reduces the amount of memory required for the application. The initial (at startup) memory demand has decreased by 30% for the original application and by 20% for extensions, which made it easier to create extensions that iOS imposes restrictions on memory usage (for example, 16 MB for extensions like Today).
Update
Xamarin.Forms 3.0 is already
available on NuGet . You can also upgrade Visual Studio 2017 to version 15.7 through the
notification center in Visual Studio . And be sure to download the
Xamarin Android Device Manager for Android Oreo. Try the news and do not forget to write a review!