Xamarin Alpha Preview

It seems like it was just weeks ago that Visual Studio 2017 was released, and we’re already working on the next Xamarin update. We’ve just pushed an Alpha preview of our next release, and I wanted to share some of the features that I’m most excited about with you. If you’d like to help in testing these updates, please switch your IDE to the Alpha channel, and install the provided updates.

Workbooks

We recently featured Workbooks on this blog, and we’re happy to show off the latest and greatest that Workbooks has to offer. Included within the Alpha preview of Workbooks is support for C# 7 with Roslyn 2.0. Regarding fixes, we’ve improved support for NuGets with Android and iOS on Windows, along with various performance improvements. More info can be found in our release notes here.

Xamarin Studio

We’re excited to offer integration with the fastlane toolkit to improve the signing experience for iOS. Fastlane offers a complete solution for automated certificate management, provisioning, and signing of iOS apps, which we feel will greatly streamline the build, test, and deploy process. While integration with fastlane is still under development, this latest release offers support for signing with it.

Xamarin.Mac

We’ve introduced an experimental feature for AoT compilation in Xamarin.Mac, as well as updates to the TLS provider (TLS 1.2 supported via AppleTLS). You’ll also find improved bindings for NSValue, NSNumber, and NSString. Check out the details here

Xamarin.iOS

We’ve introduced memory usage and executable size improvements in Xamarin.iOS. In testing with a sample app, the executable was decreased by ~200kb, while memory usage was reduced by ~400kb. Additionally, we’ve added rules to the Xamarin Analysis feature, which prevents IPA creation in debug mode, and watchOS projects now include experimental control of native optimizations. Get caught up on all of this and more in the Xamarin.iOS release notes

Xamarin.Android

We made several improvements to fast deployment for Xamarin.Android, and we now correctly handle Timeout and CancellationTokens with AndroidClientHandler. TLS 1.2 support is also available as an experimental feature in WebRequest via BoringSSL. See the release notes here for further details.

Odds and Ends

There are many other improvements across a range of Xamarin products, including Xamarin Studio and Xamarin for Visual Studio. Feedback is always welcome, and any bugs found can be filed on our Bugzilla page. Happy coding!

Note: Visual Studio 2017 is not currently supported in this release. We are working on resolving the issue quickly.