Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2: Great news for Xamarin

Microsoft has released a new preview version of the new Visual Studio 2019.

The good thing is that it can be installed without affecting your current Visual Studio installation, so if you want to try it now, you can install it for free from here.

We love Visual Studio but in particular we love Xamarin, so let’s see what are the news related to it:

Build and Deploy time

It seems that this new version of Visual Studio brings a massive improvement in Build and Deploy time.

According to Pierce Boggan: “Incremental build times in the Visual Studio 2019 Preview for the SmartHotel360 app are 29.66% better than the Visual Studio 2017 version 15.8 release, and deployment times are over twice as fast

STEPVISUAL STUDIO 2017 VERSION 15.8VISUAL STUDIO 2019 PREVIEW 2DELTA
First Build01:04.2000:50.13-21.95%
Incremental Build (XAML Change)00:10.6200:07.47-29.66%
Deploy (XAML Change)00:09.0300:04.44-50.83%

Considering that we spend most of our days building and deploying apps, even few seconds are more than appreciated and here we are talking about 30%. Not bad!

Enhanced Fast Deployment for Android

Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2 adds support for enhanced fast deployment. It means that it will generate a new APK only when necessary.

To enable this feature, add these lines to your Android file project:

<PropertyGroup>   
<AndroidFastDeploymentType>Assemblies:Dexes</AndroidFastDeploymentType> 
</PropertyGroup>

Xamarin.Forms

In Visual Studio 2019 we can use a property panel to help us writing our XAML files. We just need to select a control and all its properties will appear in the property panel.

XAML IntelliSense

Visual Studio 2019 has a better IntelliSense and will include IntelliCode that will recommend us the common items putting them on top of the completion list according to the context.

Designers

The Android designer adds support for Android Pie (9.0) while now IntelliSense is supported for Android XML files.

The iOS Designer adds support to render custom controls that need to load native dynamic libraries or frameworks.

What else

Visual Studio 2019 produces faster Android Apps with smaller APKs thanks to d8 and r8.

To enable these two features add these lines to your Android project file:

d8:

<PropertyGroup>   
<AndroidDexTool>d8</AndroidDexTool>
</PropertyGroup>

r8:

<PropertyGroup>   
<AndroidLinkTool>r8</AndroidLinkTool>
</PropertyGroup>

Visual Studio 2019 also adds the Xamarin Forms Shell Template.

There are many other improvements to Visual Studio 2019, so I’ll suggest you to try it and maybe give your feedback to Microsoft.

What do you think about Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2? Tell us writing a comment…