Today Xamarin is holding their annual Xamarin Evolve developer event and their have been several noteworthy announcements. Ever since the Microsoft BUILD event last month, Xamarin for Visual Studio is now included in every version of Visual Studio. This version has received a couple new noteworthy features:
iOS Simulator Remoting
Our iOS Simulator remoting enables you to interact with apps running in Apple’s iOS Simulator running on a Mac as though the simulator were running locally. Even multi-touch interactions are supported on Windows machines with touch capable screens, so you can interact with your app just as a user would by tapping, pinching, or swiping your touchscreen display—things that could previously only be tested on physical devices. The simulator also supports all the features you would expect such as device rotation, taking a screenshot, and even simulating location changes.
iOS USB Remoting
Debugging on simulators is a great start, but there is really no substitute for testing on physical devices. Today, we previewed support for iOS USB remoting which makes it possible to deploy and debug apps from Visual Studio to an iOS device plugged into your Windows PC. Simply connect your device to a Windows 10 machine via USB, select the device to deploy to, and debug your app on an iOS device without ever having to leave Windows.
To enable these features you need to switch to the Xamarin alpha release channel inside your install of Visual Studio.
They also announced the release of Xamarin Studio 6 (formerly MonoDevelop). New features in this release include:
- a new dark theme
- Roslyn support, Microsoft’s open source .NET compiler
- a new project model with deeper MSBuild integration
- F# improvements including F# support for Xamarin forms
- Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android library updates
- addition of Workbooks, a REPL like coding system, similar to Apple’s Playground for Swift
You can read more about the new releases here.