Xamarin.Forms not ready for battle conditions?

Xamarin is a product that allows using .NET to write an application immediately for 3 mobile platforms - Android , iOS and Windows Phone . Not so long ago, a new technology was added to the product - Xamarin.Forms , which allows you to write one XML file with markup for all platforms at once. But how ready is this technology for use in production?

Visual editor and autocompletion

So far, there is no visual editor or preview of what is obtained from XML (or, more precisely, XAML ). Yes, yes, I myself wrote quite a while ago PHP and HTML in editors like Notepad ++, and I remember that this is quite real. But there I needed seconds to see what happens - save and press F5 in the browser. Here you need to compile and compile the application, upload it to devices or emulators, go to the page you need ... it doesn’t go so fast.



What is even more striking is that when editing the markup, we will not have tips on available objects and their properties. Even when working from native Xamarin Studio. Welcome to the past ...

Support for ReSharper and Visual Studio

Another problem when working with Xamarin.Forms is that code files are generated using XML markup. It's good. But unlike code generation by the Storyboard editor, these files are generated during the direct assembly of the project, in a temporary directory. From such joy, ReSharper goes crazy and cannot normally highlight and advise anything, as indeed Visual Studio itself .



In the native Xamarin Studio , this is an order, but I do not really like this studio. What are the occasional crashes when trying to do the most banal thing - save the file by pressing Ctrl + S! Specifically, this does not apply to Xamarin.Forms, but this error has consistently “pleased” me since last year.

Trivia from comments

From the comments of others, the developer also found that, at least

• Own fonts can be used only for iOS without problems so far - for Android, you have to write your own render ( Custom Render )
• There are problems with the logic for specifying the sizes and indents of elements, more details here

In general, the idea is good, but right now, after playing around and feeling the tools, I still chose the development of an individual interface for iOS and Android. Someone of course can say that I snickered, but damn it! Today, tools sometimes solve no less than the technology itself. An experienced developer using IDE hints, auto-completion and other modern joys (like statistical analyzers) can save a lot of time and avoid a lot of mistakes. In the case of Xamarin.Forms, this is still pretty bleak.

What is your experience with using Xamarin.Forms? Are you ready to endure all the shortcomings or have you taken it to production? Or maybe I misunderstood everything and in fact all the features necessary for me are already in stock, just need to be fooled with the settings? Waiting for your comments!