Xamarin has released Xamarin 4 offering enhancements to the companies cross platform development platform including additions to the Xamarin Test Cloud and the new Xamarin Insights real-time app monitoring service.
New improvements include functionality for developing iOS apps in Visual Studio, Mono/.NET upgrades, improvements to Xamarin’s iOS and Android designers, a new Xamarin Test Recorder preview tool for mobile UI testing, and Xamarin.UITest C# testing framework for advanced testing. Other new features include:
- iOS Apps in Visual Studio: Connect to a Mac to develop, build, debug, and deploy applications using rebuilt support for developing iOS apps from Visual Studio.
- XIB Launch Screens: Support multiple iOS form factors with a XIB-based launch screen using the designer.
- tvOS with Xamarin: Apple’s tvOS is based on iOS, but has a number of key UI and framework differences which are leveraged with Xamarin 4.
- Creating iOS Extensions: Allow apps to create a rich inter-app experience by passing documents and context between them.
- Android Material Design in Xamarin.Forms: Android Material Design is Google’s new design language and Xamarin.Forms now supports it.
- Xamarin Forms 2.0: Includes a number of new features and performance enhancements.
To learn more about the new features, developers can access free Xamarin 4 Lightning Lectures from Xamarin University.