Xamarin Blog

An open source mobile platform for building Android, iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS apps with .NET.

Connect(); 2018 Xamarin Announcements

Today, at Microsoft Connect(); 2018, we have several exciting announcements about brand new capabilities and foundational improvements in the Xamarin platform driven by your generous feedback. Visual Studio developers everywhere will enjoy updated stable releases of Xamarin with Visual Studio 2017 and Visual Studio 2017 for Mac. We are also giving you the first hands-on preview of Visual Studio 2019, along with Xamarin.Forms 4.0. Below are just a few highlights from today’s announcements:

Xamarin.Forms 3.3.0: Little Things, Huge Difference

The Xamarin.Forms team has been working closely with our open-source community to help fill in the “little things”. Things you’ve told us are important to building your mobile apps and being supremely productive in the process. Since Xamarin.Forms 3.0 shipped at Build 2018, we have been collaborating with you to deliver over 20 new features and fixes. With many more on the roadmap!

Using the Android Designer Split View

The ability to see the design view and layout XML at the same time, side by side, was one of our most requested features for the Android Designer. With Split View, new in the Visual Studio 2017 version 15.8 release, you can switch back & forth freely between both modes of working. Edit the layout XML to see the changes immediately previewed in the designer or make changes in the designer and see the XML update.

Get Ready for iOS 12 and Xcode 10

Support for iOS 12 and Xcode 10 to accompany Apple’s Xcode Gold Master (GM) release has just been announced! We have also published updated documentation and samples to help you quickly get started with all the latest new features. Now, build your Xamarin.iOS (and of course Xamarin.Forms for iOS) applications with Xcode 10 GM and submit your iOS 12, tvOS 12, and watchOS 5 applications to the Apple App Store.