There's a new version of Xamarin Forms with a Visual State Manager, Flex Layout, Style Sheets, and Right-to-Left support.

Xamarin gives developers a way to develop apps for iOS and Android using C#. It is based on Mono, the open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET Framework. The introduction of Xamarin.Forms in Xamarin 3 added the ability to build native UIs for iOS, Android and Windows Phone from a single, shared C# codebase. Xamarin.Forms provides cross-platform controls and layouts which are mapped to native controls at runtime, which means that your user interfaces are fully native. Xamarin developers have a choice of coding in Visual Studio, or in Xamarin Studio, which runs on Windows and Mac.

Visual State Manager has been available on other XAML platforms, and Microsoft has now added it to Xamarin.Forms 3.0. It lets you dynamically change your UI based what screen type is available to your app You can now define the various states for your layouts and controls declaratively in XAML or C# and update your UI.

The next improvement is the addition of a new layout, FlexLayout, which has been inspired by the web’s Flexbox. The reason for its addition is that the variety of screen dimensions that your Xamarin.Forms apps can run on has grown significantly. FlexLout gives you more control over how children are distributed and how your layouts adapt to various sizes and dimensions. The developers asy it also promotes a flatter UI hierarchy.

Support for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) has also been added to the new version to provide a complimentary way to express Styles together with XAML Style. StyleSheets can be added as separate CSS files in your project, or inline in your Resources. A variety of common selectors are available to compose your styles.

Xamarin.Forms developers using Visual Studio 2017 version 15.7 will also be able to make much better use of IntelliSense, as the Xamarin.Forms version is now powered by the same IntelliSense engine as that in WPF and UWP. The improvements this offers include improved matching, binding/commanding completion, resource completion, markup extension completion. The engine also enhanced light bulb suggestions, code navigation, and linting.

More Information

Xamarin.Forms on NuGet

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