xamarin studio and visual studio for mac

Xamarin studio and visual studio for mac how to#

Based on my many, many failed attempts at getting this to work, AddinMaker v1.4.2 is the one that works. Using Xamarin.Forms Inside Visual Studio Macįirst things first, you must have version 1.4.2 of the Addin Maker installed into Visual Studio Mac.

Xamarin studio and visual studio for mac how to#

So, read on to learn how to use Xamarin.Forms inside Visual Studio Mac to build rich user interfaces for your tooling.įull source code for this blog post can be found here.

To prove that this technique is valid for production-ready tooling and is not just a toy, we'll be building an image asset browser you can use to visually explore images inside a solution: By using XAML to build MFractors UIs, I can use MFractor to build itself an awesome process of dogfooding to accelerate product development.With a Xamarin.Forms WPF backend available, user interfaces are reusable in both Visual Studio Mac and Visual Studio Windows.We can use data-binding to save a lot of 'glue' code and can also make use of value converters, triggers and behaviours.

This dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for developing Visual Studio Mac extensions. XAML is much, much easier to work with than XWT, Visual Studio Macs UI framework.Therefore, there are compelling reasons to use Xamarin.Forms to build Visual Studio Mac extensions: As a bootstrapped business, this time-cost makes it prohibitively expensive to develop tools that are UI-centric. Ever since I commercialised MFractor in June 2017, I've been pulled to the idea of using XAML and Xamarin.Forms to build user interfaces for Visual Studio Mac extensions.įor MFractor, developing tools like the Image Wizard or Localisation Wizard cost days to weeks of engineering effort.