XAML Hot Reload for Xamarin.Forms Previewed in Visual Studio 2019 for Mac 8.3 -- Visual Studio Magazine

XAML Hot Reload for Xamarin.Forms Previewed in Visual Studio 2019 for Mac 8.3

By David Ramel
09/24/2019

Visual Studio 2019 for Mac 8.3 debuted yesterday (Sept. 23) with quicker Xamarin UI changes testing, an improved Web development experience and more.

"We are making XAML Hot Reload for Xamarin.Forms available in this release as a preview," said Jordan Matthiesen, senior program manager, in an announcement post. "XAML Hot Reload enables you to rapidly iterate on your Xamarin.Forms UI without needing to build and deploy. When debugging your app, you can now edit your XAML and hit save to see the changes immediately reflected on the running app. This works on all valid deployment targets, including simulators, emulators, and physical devices. To get started, check out the XAML Hot Reload documentation."

All of the IDE's Web editors have been updated -- borrowing from Visual Studio for Windows -- as part of the goal of optimizing the ASP.NET Core developer workflow.

Also on the Web side, automatic File Nesting for ASP.NET Core projects is provided with applied rules borrowed from Visual Studio for Windows, along with support for targeting multiple Web browsers in ASP.NET Core app debugging.

Matthiesen also touted Android 10, Xcode 11 and iOS 13 support for Xamarin.

Also, new "Delighters" were introduced in response to developer feedback asking for support of more keyboard shortcuts found in Visual Studio for Windows. Upon launch, the IDE provides a prompt with which developers can choose what keyboard shortcuts they prefer to use, with choices being: VS for Mac, VS for Windows, Visual Studio Code or Xcode.

Another new feature is multi-targeting functionality, to build for multiple .NET frameworks when developers have to use APIs in .NET frameworks that don't support .NET Standard, a formal specification for APIs that are intended to be available on all .NET implementations.

"Recently, we included support for working on projects that support multi-targeting, another highly requested feature," Matthiesen said. "When editing code in one of these projects, you can use a Target Framework drop down at the top of the editor window to focus your editing experience on a specific target framework."

VS for Mac 8.3 also sports: support for .NET Core 3.0, .NET Standard 2.1, and C# 8.0; and NuGet solution-level package management.

All of the above and much more is explained in more detail in the release notes.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

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