Xamarin.Forms Productivity Tools

There are lots of great extensions out there to help you out with your Xamarin.Forms development.  Here are some of my favourites.

Mobile Essentials

Resharper now has intellisense for XAML Xamarin Forms, but if you don’t roll with R#, you can still get intellisense using the Visual Studio extension called Mobile Essentials.  This adds much needed intellisense right into the IDE.

XF.Templates

If you use Resharper, the most excellent Xamarin University trainer Glenn Stephens has published a set of Resharper Live Templates for common Xamarin Forms actions.  You can get hold of them over at Glenn’s Github.

XAML Regions

If you create Xamarin.Forms code in XAML then this simple extension allows you to define collapsible regions in your XAML.  XAML, as lovely as it is, sometimes gets pretty verbose and hard to navigate, so it’s nice to be able to have collapsible regions to help focus.  The regions are done via comments so if somebody else is looking at your XAML code and doesn’t have the extension it will not explode. Available via Visual Studio Gallery

XAML Styler

This plugin does pretty much what it says on the box.  It styles your XAML code into a nice consistent layout every time you save a XAML file.  It’s got loads of customisation options.  I use this on any XAML code I do because it just helps keep everything consistent, even if multiple people are working on the code base. It is also available via Visual Studio Gallery

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So there’s a few tools to help boost productivity developing Xamarin Forms.  Hit me up in the comments and let me know what your favourite tools are.