5 Things You’ll Love in Xamarin.Forms 3.5

David Ortinau

Although Valentine’s Day isn’t for a few more days, we just couldn’t wait to celebrate the love by sharing a new stable release of Xamarin.Forms – 3.5. Your engagement and contributions with Xamarin have been heartwarming, and we love working with you.

Every month we survey Xamarin developers in Visual Studio and via Twitter while conducting dozens of interviews and listening to your firsthand stories. Why? To make Xamarin better. For you! We have learned that you are more satisfied (+8% for you fans of statistics) with Xamarin when you use our latest versions. Additionally, you have indicated that it is because you like the direction the product is taking and how we are delivering on your specific feedback. Thank you, it’s working!

Let’s take a closer look at what we at Microsoft (in collaboration with you, our fantastic contributors) are delivering in Xamarin.Forms 3.5!

1. Every Layout is Bindable

Perhaps you’re one of the many developers that have been longing for a repeater control; something that can display a group of the same thing without all the overhead of a virtualized list control. Thanks to a wonderful contribution from Andrei Nitescu, we are shipping BindableLayout in 3.5.0. He gave us a thorough look at BindableLayout in an article last month, so let’s summarize by looking at a sample from our own Javier Suarez Ruiz on the Visual Studio for Mac team. In the code below he is creating a horizontal list of friends (good choice putting Miguel first btw):

<StackLayout
     Orientation = "Horizontal"
     BindableLayout.ItemsSource = "{Binding Profile.Friends}">
     <BindableLayout.ItemTemplate>
          <DataTemplate>
          <Grid>
               <Grid.RowDefinitions>
                    <RowDefinition Height = "*" />
                    <RowDefinition Height = "Auto" />
               </ Grid.RowDefinitions>
                    <imageCircle: CircleImage 
                         Grid.Row = "0"
                         Source = "{Binding Picture}"
                         Aspect = "AspectFit"
                         Style = "{StaticResource FriendImageStyle}" />
                    <Label 
                    Grid.Row = "1"
                         Text = "{Binding Name}"
                         Style = "{StaticResource FriendNameStyle}" />
               </ Grid>
          </ DataTemplate>
     </BindableLayout.ItemTemplate>
</ StackLayout>

Breaking down what you see in the XAML above, BindableLayout.ItemsSource and its siblings are attached properties on StackLayout, and that could be any Layout<T> you choose. Set your source to an IEnumerable, define your template, and you’ve got a repeater! Read more about Javier’s blog example here.

2. Toolbar Accessibility

When you application is accessible, everyone wins, especially your users. The latest version of Xamarin.Forms aims to make application accessibility easier to implement. Three controls that have been notoriously problematic to set up for screen readers are:

• Toolbar items
• MasterDetailPage toggle button
• NavigationPage back button

This pull request ensures that screen readers (VoiceOver etc.) can now access and read the buttons you place in the navigation bar and toolbars. Generally speaking, here are the rules for each platform:

• iOS / UWP will look for values in this order: AutomationProperties.Name, AutomationProperties.HelpText, and then Text
• Android will read the AutomationProperties.Name or AutomationProperties.HelpText when provided, and replace the visible Text with those values. (this is a current limitation of Android API 25 and lower)

Unifying an API across multiple platforms is rarely easy and straight forward, so for more details about using Automation Properties check out the documentation and refer to the pull request notes.

3. Unsealing the Span

It’s frustrating when attempting to extend a control to run into a sealed class that stops you dead in your tracks. When this happens, please file an issue so we can evaluate the code and unblock you. Such was the case when Michael Rumpler (aka MR.Gestures, or Mister Gestures to me) ran into with Span (Issue). Graciously, Gerald Versluis did Michael (and all of us) a favor by submitting a pull request. Go team!

4. Community and Hacktoberfest Contributions

The Xamarin.Forms project has enjoyed a wonderful surge of contributions and participation! Whether it was for the t-shirts or just the personal sense of achievement, we are so glad to have you with us. A handful of improvements are now shipping from your efforts in 3.5.0 including:

As with every release, the Samsung team continues to add Tizen support across the board for new capabilities. Thank you! You are relentless.

5. Quality and Polish

We are thrilled to resume our frequent cadence of shipping not only useful features and enhancements as noted above, but also continuing the flow of fundamental improvements to the core reliability and performance of the toolkit. As we have seeing from the Xamarin.Android team, build times are being reduced, deployment is being sped up, and many mysterious build change problems have been demystified and corrected. The IDE teams are bringing us improvements to the XAML Previewer, an all-new Property Panel, and AI-assisted IntelliSense with IntelliCode.

Some recent progress:

• Android’s D8 dexer and R8 shrinker
• What’s New for Xamarin Developers in Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2

See Xamarin.Forms 3.5 in Action!

Update and Enjoy Today

As always, you can find all the details about the latest release by reviewing the 3.5.0 release notes. Update Xamarin.Forms to 3.5.0 using your favorite NuGet package manager and do a full rebuild. Please let us know if you encounter issues of any kind, or if you have any idea that will improve your daily use of Xamarin. Just head over to GitHub and file a new issue.

To play around with the features of this and each new release, grab a clone of TheLittleThingsPlayground on GitHub.

BONUS: Keep in mind that 3.5.0 also contains previews of other new features that the Xamarin team is currently developing,. We look forward to receiving your feedback on Shell, Visual, CollectionView, and CarouselView. As you explore these features, please take a moment to share with us your thoughts here.

David Ortinau Principal Product Manager, .NET Multi-platform App UI

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