Announcing Xamarin.Forms Stable Release 2.3.4

Today, we’re excited to announce the latest stable release of Xamarin.Forms, version 2.3.4.224. The major themes of this release are quality and performance. For the complete list of updates, as well as some important notes, be sure to review the full release notes here.

Xamarin.Forms 2.3.4 Highlights If you’ve been monitoring our

public roadmap and pre-releases, these will be familiar to you. * Android Startup Time Improvements * Bindable Picker * OnIdiom Support for Desktop * XAMLC Improvements * Nearly 200 bug fixes * Over 50 community contributed pull requests

Android Startup Time Improvements We’ve put startup time on Android under the microscope and made several incremental adjustments to eke out milliseconds of improvement. A few of these improvements include code optimizations to speed JIT compilation time at startup, on-demand loading of custom font files and

Application.Properties store, streamlining of handler registration for things like effects and custom renderers, and refactoring of renderer constructors. How noticeable these changes are for you will depend on your application code and devices. We continue to look for areas to improve performance across the board, especially in startup and view inflation.

Bindable Picker What data entry form doesn’t benefit from using a Picker control at some point? You’ll be glad to see that we’ve listened to your feedback with this release and enable binding support. It works just like you’d expect for the properties ItemsSource, SelectedIndex, SelectedItem, Title, and TextColor.

<Picker 
    Title="Select a Color" 
    ItemsSource="{Binding Colors}" />

Desktop Idiom

Desktop is now a supported Idiom. When running UWP applications on the desktop, this will now be the returned Idiom, and when running the same application on a device it will return Phone.

<StackLayout> 
    <StackLayout.Orientation> 
        <OnIdiom x:TypeArguments="StackOrientation"> 
            <OnIdiom.Phone>Vertical</OnIdiom.Phone> 
            <OnIdiom.Tablet>Vertical</OnIdiom.Tablet> 
            <OnIdiom.Desktop>Horizontal</OnIdiom.Desktop> 
        </OnIdiom> 
    </StackLayout.Orientation> 
... 
</StackLayout>

For more information, check out our

blog post on the bindable picker control.

XAMLC Improvements XAMLC provides fantastic compile time checking of your XAML code when enabled, as well as improving the overall performance of your application. Xamarin.Forms 2.3.4 increases the scope of the XAML features that are now compiled. This means you’ll get better validation of your code, which may result in new compiler errors that you haven’t seen before. For example, when using Attached Properties, be sure to specify a public getter and setter or you may see new errors. Read those compiler messages closely—your code will be better for it!

Update Today This release is available today

via NuGet. Be sure to review the full release notes here and, as usual, when upgrading an existing solution, update all projects in your solution that reference Xamarin.Forms. Join the discussion around the future of Xamarin.Forms by visiting the Evolution forum where the Xamarin.Forms team and the community propose changes and features. Discuss this post on the Xamarin Forums