What's new for mobile developers in Visual Studio 15.6 Preview
Habr, hello! My name is Romuald (you can just Roman) Zdebsky. I have been working at Microsoft for over 11 years. In recent years, he has helped key Microsoft partners in the release of popular games and applications for the Windows platform, for example, VKontakte clients for the Windows Store, games such as World Of Tanks Blitz, Cut The Rope 2 and many others. From a technological point of view, I was engaged in a lot of XAML frameworks and data access technologies. Now my area of technological interest is the development of mobile applications using Visual Studio and Xamarin, data access technologies in Azure, CosmosDB, etc.
Last month, we released Visual Studio 2017 15.5 with new features, including iOS Remoted Simulator, available to all developers, XAML viewer in real time in Android emulators using Xamarin Live Player, new Xamarin.Forms project templates for .NET Standard and Enhanced Mac Binding.
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In January, a preliminary version of Visual Studio 2017 15.6 became available. In this article, we will discuss what has been added to this version, including preparing the macOS project build environment, deploying to iOS via Wi-Fi, viewing the XAML-based interface in the Remoted iOS Simulator in real time, and much more.
Creating applications for iOS using Visual Studio in Windows has become even easier thanks to a new feature that automatically prepares macOS for building. Instead of manually setting up and updating the Mac build machine yourself, just connect to your Mac, and Visual Studio will prepare and customize the build machine by installing the necessary versions of Xamarin.iOS and Mono — directly from Visual Studio, I tried it — really convenient.
The Remoted iOS Simulator , which allows you to test and debug your iOS applications within Visual Studio on Windows-based systems, is now available for all Visual Studio releases (starting with version 15.5), including the free Community Edition. The simulator supports features such as location simulation, rotation and gestures, and even includes features not found in the iOS simulator on a Mac, such as multi-touch. Visual Studio has a really useful simulator for building iOS apps on Windows, but what about devices?
Visual Studio 2017 15.6 now allows you to deploy iOS applications over a Wi-Fi network — without cables. By setting up a wireless device in Xcode, you can work with it in Visual Studio just like you would with any other device for deploying assemblies.
The Xamarin Live Player tool allows developers to deploy, test, and debug their applications using only Visual Studio and an iOS or Android device. In Visual Studio 2017 15.5, there is support for viewing live XAML-based changes directly in the Android emulator without recompiling or redeploying. In the new version, similar features are implemented in the Remoted iOS Simulator simulator for Windows.
To use this feature, select the iOS simulator from the drop-down list of target devices for deployment and click Live Run Current View in the context menu or use the keyboard shortcut or banner at the top of each XAML file.
Visual Studio 2017 15.6 also supports the CoreML platform, which was introduced in iOS 11. iOS applications can use trained machine learning models to perform tasks using the CoreML platform.
Check out our Introduction to CoreML Tutorial and a sample project to get started quickly.
This release also includes Xamarin.iOS 11.8 and Xamarin.Android 8.1, improvements to speed up the assembly of Android applications when developing in design mode (which, among other things, affect the project download speed and provide metadata for IntelliSense). Static analysis was also implemented for Xamarin.iOS projects.
To get started with the pre-release version today, download the Visual Studio Preview installer and select the installation profile Mobile .NET (Xamarin) as you do with the installer of the final versions of Visual Studio.
Keep in mind that pre-release versions of Visual Studio are installed in parallel with your current instance and are isolated from your mainstream development environment.
If you no longer need the pre-release version, simply uninstall it using the Visual Studio installer. This should not affect your stable copy; nevertheless, as a precautionary measure, we recommend that after uninstalling the preliminary version, perform the repair (Repair function) of the main version.
There are a number of useful features to try out the second preview version of Visual Studio 2017 15.6. Try and tell us about your impressions using the Help -> Report a Problem function in Visual Studio (Help -> Report a Problem). Also participate in the discussion on the Developer Community website or contact us directly via Twitter .
If you are interested in mobile development and want to learn more about these and other features of Visual Studio - January 31, we invite you to Xamarin Day, dedicated to the development of mobile applications on Xamarin. You will learn about the recommended architecture of applications on Xamarin, frequent developer errors, how to argue the use of Xamarin in a project (compared to native and cross-platform development), and also be able to ask questions to experts and members of the Xamarin community in Russia. We will also organize free focus consultations specifically for your projects and issues at this event - send a request for consultation through the website and come to the event.
Where : Moscow, Digital October
When : January 31, 9:30
How much : free
Registration : aka.ms/xam_dev_event_0118
Last month, we released Visual Studio 2017 15.5 with new features, including iOS Remoted Simulator, available to all developers, XAML viewer in real time in Android emulators using Xamarin Live Player, new Xamarin.Forms project templates for .NET Standard and Enhanced Mac Binding.
')
In January, a preliminary version of Visual Studio 2017 15.6 became available. In this article, we will discuss what has been added to this version, including preparing the macOS project build environment, deploying to iOS via Wi-Fi, viewing the XAML-based interface in the Remoted iOS Simulator in real time, and much more.
Automatic macOS preparation
Creating applications for iOS using Visual Studio in Windows has become even easier thanks to a new feature that automatically prepares macOS for building. Instead of manually setting up and updating the Mac build machine yourself, just connect to your Mac, and Visual Studio will prepare and customize the build machine by installing the necessary versions of Xamarin.iOS and Mono — directly from Visual Studio, I tried it — really convenient.
Deploying iOS Wi-Fi
The Remoted iOS Simulator , which allows you to test and debug your iOS applications within Visual Studio on Windows-based systems, is now available for all Visual Studio releases (starting with version 15.5), including the free Community Edition. The simulator supports features such as location simulation, rotation and gestures, and even includes features not found in the iOS simulator on a Mac, such as multi-touch. Visual Studio has a really useful simulator for building iOS apps on Windows, but what about devices?
Visual Studio 2017 15.6 now allows you to deploy iOS applications over a Wi-Fi network — without cables. By setting up a wireless device in Xcode, you can work with it in Visual Studio just like you would with any other device for deploying assemblies.
View live XAML interface in real time in iOS simulator
The Xamarin Live Player tool allows developers to deploy, test, and debug their applications using only Visual Studio and an iOS or Android device. In Visual Studio 2017 15.5, there is support for viewing live XAML-based changes directly in the Android emulator without recompiling or redeploying. In the new version, similar features are implemented in the Remoted iOS Simulator simulator for Windows.
To use this feature, select the iOS simulator from the drop-down list of target devices for deployment and click Live Run Current View in the context menu or use the keyboard shortcut or banner at the top of each XAML file.
Machine Learning with CoreML
Visual Studio 2017 15.6 also supports the CoreML platform, which was introduced in iOS 11. iOS applications can use trained machine learning models to perform tasks using the CoreML platform.
Check out our Introduction to CoreML Tutorial and a sample project to get started quickly.
And that's not all.
This release also includes Xamarin.iOS 11.8 and Xamarin.Android 8.1, improvements to speed up the assembly of Android applications when developing in design mode (which, among other things, affect the project download speed and provide metadata for IntelliSense). Static analysis was also implemented for Xamarin.iOS projects.
To get started with the pre-release version today, download the Visual Studio Preview installer and select the installation profile Mobile .NET (Xamarin) as you do with the installer of the final versions of Visual Studio.
Keep in mind that pre-release versions of Visual Studio are installed in parallel with your current instance and are isolated from your mainstream development environment.
If you no longer need the pre-release version, simply uninstall it using the Visual Studio installer. This should not affect your stable copy; nevertheless, as a precautionary measure, we recommend that after uninstalling the preliminary version, perform the repair (Repair function) of the main version.
There are a number of useful features to try out the second preview version of Visual Studio 2017 15.6. Try and tell us about your impressions using the Help -> Report a Problem function in Visual Studio (Help -> Report a Problem). Also participate in the discussion on the Developer Community website or contact us directly via Twitter .
Xamarin day
If you are interested in mobile development and want to learn more about these and other features of Visual Studio - January 31, we invite you to Xamarin Day, dedicated to the development of mobile applications on Xamarin. You will learn about the recommended architecture of applications on Xamarin, frequent developer errors, how to argue the use of Xamarin in a project (compared to native and cross-platform development), and also be able to ask questions to experts and members of the Xamarin community in Russia. We will also organize free focus consultations specifically for your projects and issues at this event - send a request for consultation through the website and come to the event.
Where : Moscow, Digital October
When : January 31, 9:30
How much : free
Registration : aka.ms/xam_dev_event_0118
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/347238/
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