Wow, the Xamarin blog tells us that Xamarin 3.0 is out, and that it's got this great new package of features to make creating cross-platform UIs VB6 IDE easy called Xamarin.Forms. Awesome, right? Let's download the new version.

Got it.  And now to open a new project.


Take one didn't work out so well.

Okay, let's close it and try again with a new Xamarin.Forms project.  First, it didn't give me all three projects like it said it would, only Android.  And then, when I ran the Hello, World that was preconfigured...


Wow.  That was great fun.  I can't try it out without spending $299.

Why let the starter version create the project type if I can't even F5 the out of the box skeleton?

Looks neat and all, but I think I'm back to where I was yesterday, finally getting iOS UIs created programmatically, skipping Interface Builder entirely.  Actually insanely easy, and I'm upset I didn't start doing this months ago in what little iOS Xamarin time I can squeak out.

UPDATE: From today's (5/30) webinar:

Q: Any chance we can get Xamarin.Forms working with the starter edition?  Right now, it's past the size the starter lets you compile.
A: We're looking into that. :-)

Labels: , , , , ,