Microsoft’s Build conference is over for another year and I’m still working
my way through the various sessions. I did however get a chance to take a look
at the Xamarin Live Player (https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/cross-platform/live/player/)
which is an interesting announcement and one that can help reduce the friction
of getting pre-release applications onto devices. The Live Player is in preview,
which means you’ll need the preview version of Visual Studio, the updated
Xamarin bits and the alpha channel Xamarin bits on your Mac build machine (for
those of you doing development on Windows). I highly recommend following all the
setup instructions – https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/cross-platform/live/install/.
Getting the Live Player setup and running was relatively straight forward,
after I fixed up my Mac build machine because it was
missing certificates/provision profile etc. I was able to install the Live
Player on both my iPhone and a test Android device. After creating a simple
Xamarin Forms project in Visual Studio, the Live Player is available from the
device dropdown.
After clicking run with the Live Player selected, the following dialog is
displayed. Launch the Live Player app on your test device. You can either scan
the QR code, or you can enter the code presented within the app into the
dial.
After scanning the QR code, a connection is established between the Live
Player app running on your device and the instance of Visual Studio. A new entry
should appear in the devices dropdown with your device name followed by the word
Player.
Now that you’ve associated your device, each time you want to run the
application on your device, you can simply select the appropriate player from
the devices dropdown and hit run. The app takes a second or two to deploy and
will appear on your device – this provides a very quick way for you to deploy
and test applications, particularly on an iOS device when doing development on a
Windows machine.
I can definitely see the advantage of using the Live Player but it had a few
limitations (https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/cross-platform/live/limitations/)
so I’m not sure how effective it will be until they resolve some of these.