Xamarin has released Xamarin 3, which includes four major improvements to the Xamarin platform:
1. Xamarin Designer for iOS in Visual Studio: The Xamarin Designer for iOS is a visual designer for iOS, allowing developers to quickly lay out UIs, intuitively add event handlers, take advantage of auto-layout, and see live previews of custom controls. No more gray boxes, developers will see exactly what an app will look like, right on the design surface. Xamarin Designer for iOS is integrated into both Xamarin Studio and Visual Studio.
2. Xamarin.Forms: A new library that enables developers to build native UIs for iOS, Android and Windows Phone from a single, shared C# codebase. It provides more than 40 cross-platform controls and layouts which are mapped to native controls at runtime, which means that user interfaces are fully native. Delivered as a portable class library, Xamarin.Forms facilitates mixing and matching shared UI code with platform-specific user interface APIs.
3. Major IDE Enhancements:
- Visual update: Xamarin Studio now includes a new welcome screen, hundreds of new icons, improved support for Retina displays, and some nice touches throughout the IDE.
- Streamlined Visual Studio support: Xamarin has enhanced and combined its iOS and Android extensions into a single Visual Studio extension, streamlining installation and updates for all users, and improving the build and debugging experience.
- NuGet: Xamarin 3 includes full support for using NuGet packages in mobile apps – in Visual Studio or Xamarin Studio – enabling developers the ability to take advantage of the many NuGet packages which are now shipping with Xamarin compatibility.
- .NET BCL Documentation: Full documentation for the .NET Base Class Libraries (BCL) is now integrated into Xamarin Studio.
- F# Support: Xamarin Studio now ships with built-in support for building iOS and Android apps using the F# functional programming language.
4. Improved code sharing: Xamarin 3 introduces two new code sharing techniques for cross-platform apps:
- Shared Projects: Provides a simple, clean approach to code sharing for cross-platform application developers. Xamarin developers can now use Shared Projects to share code across iOS, Android, and Windows in either Xamarin Studio or Visual Studio.
- Portable Class Libraries: Portable Class Libraries are libraries that are consumable across a diverse range of .NET platforms. Xamarin 3 can both produce and consume PCLs from both Xamarin Studio and Visual Studio.