Introduction
Microsoft mainly focused on the key areas to make Visual Studio more productive when authoring Xamarin apps, including optimizations to build and deploy, as well as, improvements to UI authoring experiences.
Let us look at all the awesome features of Visual Studio 2019 Xamarin Developer. Visual Studio 2019 and Visual Studio 2019 for Mac are now available so you can download and start using them with awesome VS features.
Lower disk impact
The VS2019 release focuses on the stability and performance of fundamentals. Visual Studio 2017 required a minimum of 23 GB disk space but Visual Studio 2019 is now 3.28x smaller in the size, i.e., just 5GB to 7GB and you can make a faster installation with lower disk impact. So, there is no need to wait a very long time for the installation to finish.
Solutions creation
The Visual Studio team has improved the solutions creation time by up to 2x and solutions load time by 23% on the real-world profiled solutions.
Android SDK Update
Managing Android SDKs can be very difficult, especially when working on complex solutions across teams. Some of them may not be aware of the difference between target, compile, and minimum framework versions. Visual Studio 2017 tried for Android SDK auto-update but need manual enabling from the Tools option.
Visual Studio 2019, on the other hand, automatically analyzes our app while the project loads. Then, it determines if you have the necessary Android SDK configuration to build and offers to install those components for you to resolve any configuration conflicts.
Faster Build and Deployment
Visual Studio 2019 has improved Xamarin Build and Deployment. You can check that your Enterprise application build time is 26.6% faster than that of Visual Studio 2017 and the deployment time is now twice as fast.
Shell Project template
Visual Studio 2019 has added Shell project template to the Xamarin.Forms. Shell provides 3 tiers of elements to our application and then gets out of our way to start populating the app with content and features. With Shell template, you get the following advantages:
- A simplified way to express the high level of your application architecture in a single file (AppShell.xaml)
- A hierarchy of common UI navigation patterns that suite your target mobile platforms: flyout menu, bottoms tabs, top tabs
- A robust navigation service that provides URI-based routing so you can jump directly to any part of your application with ease
- An extensible template-based infrastructure to easily customize elements of your UI
Visual design experiences for iOS and Android
Visual Studio 2019 improved the new IntelliSense experience for XAML with matching around the control and property names to ensure you receive the correct suggestion.
The XAML Previewer shows you how your Xamarin.Forms XAML page will look on iOS and Android. When you make changes to your XAML, you'll see them previewed immediately alongside your code. The XAML Previewer is available in Visual Studio and Visual Studio for Mac.
You can now edit common attributes for your Xamarin.Forms controls in the property panel for Visual Studio 2019 on Windows. Open the property panel by going to View → Properties Window. The property panel will show attributes for whatever control is currently in focus in your XAML file.
Summary
In this article, you learned about the new features added for Xamarin development in Visual Studio 2019. If you have any questions/ feedback/ issues, please write them in the comment box.