The other thing to bear in mind here is the cost 25/month for Xamarin Indie vs 83 / month for the business edition which includes the Visual Studio plugin (which actually doesn’t work very well in my experience).

Debugging and deploying Xamarin applications. With these in place I have to say that using Xamarin Studio is a complete no brainer. Feel free to weigh in and add your +1 and comments on this issue. Visual Studio (as do Fire and Water) integrate directly with Xcode (on the Mac) and Android Studio (on Windows and Mac) to make it easy, convenient and, most of all, seamless to work with UI files in the platform's native designers alongside your Elements projects inside Visual Studio.Īnd of course Visual Studio already provides embedded designers for the Windows platform – WinForms, and XAML – and Elements integrates directly with these designers*. Note: there is currently no visual designer for Xamarin Forms XAML. The Live Visual Tree allows you to see your UI hierarchy and locate the XAML source, and XAML Hot Reload continues to be improved as well. Since Visual Studio 2010, Silverlight project support has been added to the IDE. Working with the Visual Designers from Visual StudioĮlements does not reinvent the wheel for UI design, but instead embraces each platform's native UI toolsets and with that, each platform's native way to write and design UIs.įor Windows, there's WinForms, as well as the new XAML-based UI design paradigm used by WPF, WinRT, SIlverlight, Windows Phone and the Universal Application Platform (UAP).įor Cocoa, these are XIB and Storyboard files that can be edited in Xcode.įor Android, these are XML Layout Files that can be edited either as plain text XML, or using visual designers in Android Studio. The XAML Live Preview is one of the most exciting features that mirrors your running application within Visual Studio and enables adding layout guides and zooming to get your pixel perfect alignment. In the field of UI design, it shares a lot of the WPF concepts.

Xaml designer xamarin studio mac