Matthew Leibowitz: Xamarin 4 – in Bullet Form

With the announcement of Xamarin 4, there were hundreds of changes, new features and improvement. Xamarin included major and minor changes to all phases of the lifecycle of a mobile app.

I thought I would re-share some of the features, just in case you missed some 🙂 But, during my presentation at the Gauteng Xamarin User Group, I saw some areas that were especially interesting to South Africa developers.

New in the Xamarin Platform

The most well known area of Xamarin is the BUILD platform. This received some love:

• Xamarin.Forms 2.0
  
  Faster, more reliable, and more functional. Pre-compiled XAML. Support for UWP, iOS 9 and Android Material Design. New gestures.
• Visual Studio and iOS
  
  Rebuilt the Visual Studio extension from the ground up. Multiple concurrent Visual Studio instances.
• Mono/.NET Upgrade
  
  Incorporated large portions from Microsoft’s open sourced .NET codebase.
• Android and iOS Designers
  
  iOS designer can load XIB files. Android designer supports Android Material Design. Improved UI and UX for both designers.
• Objective Sharpie & CocoaPods
  
  Improved parsing of header files. New attributes for Objective-C equivalents. Support for generating bindings from a CocoaPod.

New in Xamarin Test Cloud

More recently added to Xamarin is the advanced testing capabilities using new testing tools:

• Xamarin Test Recorder
  
  New preview tool that makes mobile UI testing dead simple. Initially available for Mac
• Xamarin.UITest 1.0
  
  New capabilities for advanced test scenarios. Free for everyone to use. No limits on test duration. No limits on the use of local devices and simulators.

Xamarin Insights

Now generally available, you can track your apps in the wild:

• General Availability
  
  Free crash reporting for all Xamarin Platform customers. 30 days data retention.

Something for Everyone

Along with new features and improvements, Xamarin has given developers even more free stuff with each subscription:

• Xamarin Insights with 30 day data retention.
• 60 Xamarin Test Cloud device minutes per month.
• Complete access to Xamarin.UITest.
• A 30-day trial pass to Xamarin University.

Read the official announcement by Xamarin.