Xamarin: Xamarin Podcast: MVVM Frameworks with James Montemagno

Deciding which patterns to use when developing your app can be difficult, which is why James Montemagno and I discuss MVVM frameworks and our approach to developing cross-platform apps with as much code reuse as possible on this week’s episode of the Xamarin Podcast. Subscribe or Download Today Knowing the latest in .NET, C#, and Xamarin […]

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Daniel Cazzulino: How to disable Xamarin Forms XAML Intellisense in VS 2015

Straight answer first just in case you’re in a hurry:

  1. Delete C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0Common7IDEExtensionsXamarinXamarin[VERSION]static.14.pkgdef
  2. Run devenv /updateconfiguration

In addition to this manual workaround, we’ll post an updated Xamarin.Forms pre-release nuget package that won’t provide the design assemblies to XAML and will stop the crash from happening. But that won’t turn off XAML intellisense, which will be all red (as it is without the 1.5-pre nuget).

Now the long answer if you’re interested 🙂

XML vs XAML intellisense

For Visual Studio 2012 and 2013, we provide Xamarin.Forms intellisense by extending the core text editor using the same extensibility APIs you use to extend any other text-based editor. Besides being able to use some XML-editor provided APIs to access the current document, we basically have to keep track of keystrokes, completion sessions, dismissal on Esc and so on. In addition to also discovering types and members available for completion.

In Visual Studio 2015, the XAML editor became extensible so we could take advantage of all the work already done by Microsoft for WPF by just providing some metadata via the NuGet package itself, and registering our Xamarin.Forms namespace to opt-in XAML intellisense instead. This was the result of close collaboration with the XAML team, since XF is pretty much the first non-WPF flavor of XAML around.

In addition to being a solid editor for many years, opting in for XAML intellisense also means we will get all new features they add to WPF for free. In particular around the data binding expressions and markup extensions.

Unfortunately, when we enabled XAML intellisense for our XML namespace, we triggered a bug that causes the XAML editor to crash VS. Microsoft is aware of the issue, has identified the issue and is actively looking for ways to ship this to users. Worst case, it should be available in VS2015 Update 1, november-ish.

How to get XML intellisense back

We will soon release an update to the current stable release that will re-enable the XML-based intellisense for Xamarin.Forms. Stay tunned on the Release Blog for news.

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Xamarin: Xamarin.UITest Reaches 1.0 Release

Mobile app users form a lasting impression of your app within the first minute that can make them long-term, loyal users who encourage their peers to use the app, or they could have a bad experience, encountering a bug or slow load times, that immediately make them abandon the app and find an alternative. We […]

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Keith Rome: Understanding Native Image Sizing in Xamarin Forms Apps

This post is about probably my least favorite part of mobile app development – figuring out and assembling all of the various images needed to build an application and publish it into the stores. Each platform has its own requirements for this, and often you will need to provide multiple resolution versions within each platform in order to handle varying pixel density ratios. Xamarin supports all of the necessary resource types of course, but it is still up to us as developers to include the right images in our projects.

For very simply apps this isn’t quite as big of a problem – but it becomes a huge headache for medium-size and large-size apps. To help make my life easier, I like to use a spreadsheet to identify all of the images needed along with the final image resolutions and preferred file names. This works great because I can give this spreadsheet to the UX designer and have them provide all of the assets – already sized and named appropriately so that I can just drop them right into my project. So let’s cover all of the various image types that an app might need – including both the minimum required images as well as optional ones.… Read more

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Keith Rome: Understanding native image sizing in Xamarin Forms apps

This post is about probably my least favorite part of mobile app development – figuring out and assembling all of the various images needed to build an application and publish it into the stores. Each platform has its own requirements for this, and often you will need to provide multiple resolution versions within each platform in order to handle varying pixel density ratios. Xamarin supports all of the necessary resource types of course, but it is still up to us as developers to include the right images in our projects.

For very simply apps this isn’t quite as big of a problem – but it becomes a huge headache for medium-size and large-size apps. To help make my life easier, I like to use a spreadsheet to identify all of the images needed along with the final image resolutions and preferred file names. This works great because I can give this spreadsheet to the UX designer and have them provide all of the assets – already sized and named appropriately so that I can just drop them right into my project. So let’s cover all of the various image types that an app might need – including both the minimum required images as well as optional ones.… Read more

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