Unboxing Visual Studio 2019 for Xamarin.Forms

I’ve just installed the preview for Visual Studio 2019 and wanted to share the experience of creating a new Xamarin.Forms application.

Firstly, the startup screen. Whilst I’m disappointed not to have the news feed, the new startup screen gives you a quick launching pad for whatever it is you want do in VS2019.

Let’s go with “Create a new project”. The search/filtering works well to quickly find the right project template

Now let’s provide some generic project information.

Ah and now we’re back to a familiar dialog for creating Xamarin.Forms applications. Hooray!!! there’s no option to use a shared library any more – good riddance. As you’ll see we get a .NET Standard 2.0 project where our XF pages and other logic will go.

And now we have the usual solution structure for an out of the box XF application containing the project that’ll house the pages (ie VS2019XFProject) and then head projects for iOS, Android and UWP.

Let’s hit run and check out the newly created project – notice I picked the Master-Detail template early so we get a basic layout with a hamburger button in top left.

And that’s it. BTW the chrome around the edge of the coding window seems to be progressively shrinking with each progressive release of Visual Studio. Eventually it’ll be carved back to what Visual Studio Code offers.

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Contact Built to Roam for more information on building cross-platform applications

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