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Xamarin.Forms - Xamarin Blog

Xamarin.Forms 3.3.0: Little Things, Huge Difference

October 18, 2018 Oct 18, 2018 10/18/18
David Ortinau
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!

Xamarin.Forms 3.2.0 Released: Going Big with Little Things

September 17, 2018 Sep 17, 2018 09/17/18
David Ortinau
marin.Forms 3.2.0 continues the theme of previous releases to give you big wins by making little things much easier to do. The entire version 3 series has been about reducing the friction of doing such things as positioning the Android tabs to the bottom, controlling spellcheck and capitalization and prediction on text controls. There are even trivial improvements to setting ImeOptions, coloring various elements of switches and bars, and so many more.

Using the New Xamarin.Forms Controls Toolbox

August 24, 2018 Aug 24, 2018 08/24/18
Maddy Montaquila
Today, we are excited to debut the Xamarin.Forms Controls Toolbox as part of Visual Studio 2017 version 15.8 and Visual Studio for Mac version 7.6. The toolbox lists the available Xamarin.Forms controls. Furthermore, these can be dragged directly onto the XAML editing surface to create the control on your page!

Adaptive Mobile Designs with FlexLayout

August 3, 2018 Aug 3, 2018 08/3/18
David Ortinau
Xamarin.Forms is fantastic for quickly shipping a single code base to multiple platforms and devices. As soon as you are present on all those different screens, you need to make sure your UI looks as you expect, and even adapt the layout for your specific goals. FlexLayout makes this easier than before and provides new options for you to space and distribute your UI to suit different dimensions.

Xamarin.Forms 3.1: Improving the Little Things

July 18, 2018 Jul 18, 2018 07/18/18
David Ortinau
Earlier this year, we surveyed Xamarin.Forms developers about the kinds of custom controls and extra platform code being written repeatedly that should be considered for support “in the box”. From these conversations, we created an initiative to deliver as many as we could in the next several releases. Just six weeks after shipping Xamarin.Forms 3.0 at Build 2018, we are excited to introduce Xamarin.Forms 3.1 with a batch of those enhancements to make your lives easier. Now you can spend more time investing in your applications! In this article, we'll take a look at some of the highlights.

More Cross-Platform APIs with Xamarin.Essentials Latest Preview

June 14, 2018 Jun 14, 2018 06/14/18
James Montemagno
We announced Xamarin.Essentials, a core set of cross-platform APIs to help developers build native apps, at Microsoft Build 2018. Xamarin.Essentials gives developers access to over thirty platform-specific APIs that can be accessed from their shared code, including geolocation, secure storage, sensors, device information, and many more. Best of all, Xamarin.Essentials can be used in any iOS, Android, UWP, or Xamarin.Forms app, regardless of how you create the user interface. Feedback on the first preview from developers has been fantastic, with praise of a simple and straightforward way to access these native features.

Xamarin.Essentials: Cross-Platform APIs for Mobile Apps

May 16, 2018 May 16, 2018 05/16/18
James Montemagno
When developing iOS and Android apps with Xamarin, developers can access every native platform API using C#. These bindings not only expose the platform APIs in C#, but add powerful C# features, such as async/await, events, delegates, and more. This is a huge advantage for developers, because they never have to leave C#, whether they're writing shared business logic, user interface, or accessing native features. One key feature developers often look for when developing cross-platform apps with Xamarin is a way to access common native features from their shared code without having to write their own abstractions or find an open source plugin created by the community.