Building Cross Platform Applications with Visual Studio 2017

Ok, before I jump into this, I want to point out a couple of things:

Visual Studio 2017 is still in RC

– When you install the RC of Visual Studio 2017 and enable the options to install Xamarin, you will break any existing Xamarin support for earlier versions of Visual Studio (see https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/news/releasenotes/vs2017-relnotes#KIXamarin).

I noticed the other day when I was creating a throwaway project is that there’s a new dialog when creating cross platform applications within Visual Studio 2017. In the New Project dialog, select the Cross Platform node and there is a single Cross Platform App option.

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Selecting this option presents you with some project templates – there are only a couple at the moment but I’m hoping that they provide more examples.

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Unfortunately, and it’s a little hard to see in this screenshot, for the Master Detail template, you can only select Shared Projects. Without exploring the template, I can only assume it was setup this way to share UI code that has platform specific code that compiles based on conditional flags. I really like the way that you can switch between a Forms application and a Native (and no they don’t literally mean “native” (eg Objective-C/Swift or Java/C++), they mean traditional Xamarin where you have platform specific UI.

I opted for the “Blank App (XAML)” which requires Forms, I selected PCL, but unfortunately the “Host in the cloud” option was then disabled. After hitting Accept, the new solution was created and I was immediately able to build and run the application across iOS, Android and Windows (UWP). Very nice.

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