Xamarin.Forms 4.0 is finally out

Every release of Xamarin.Forms improves the performances and adds new features. It has been a long time since the first Xamarin.Forms came out. That version was very basic and to be honest not very great. Then Xamarin.Forms 2 came out and it was better, finally something that could be used for a production app. When Xamarin.Forms 3 came out, it was great, better performances, new features. Xamarin.Forms 3 has been a great tool to create amazing multiplatform apps and now Xamarin.Forms 4.0 promises even more, again better performances and new features. Let’s see together the main news of this release.

The Shell

Shell is a new way to create our apps. First of all it allows us to add easily flyouts and menus to our apps. It also adds the concept of URI navigation.

That’s great but what is even better is that it uses “fast renderers” (see later). To use the shell, on Visual Studio 2019 starting a new Xamarin.Forms app, you can select the Shell template. To get more info about Shell, you can use this documentation:

Android Fast Renderers

Android Fast Renderers were introduced in Xamarin.Forms 2.4 but disabled by default. The idea behind them is to reduce the number of views required to render a particular control. Honestly you could see improved performances so now they are enabled by default. This means that you will notice better perfomances with the enw Xamarin.Forms.

Image Source Unification

From Xamarin.Forms 3.5, they have introduced the FontImageSource to use the font glyphs but was not possible to use it everywhere. From version 4.0using ImageSource you can use them wherever you want.

Accessibility

From Xamarin Forms 4.0 we can now control the focus order directly in X.F. To do this, we can use the TabIndex property available on any VisualElement.

Conclusion

I will personally test Xamarin.Forms 4.0 and in particular the Shell to see how great that is. I will also test the new navigation pattern (URI Navigation) to see if there are improvements here. I will also evaluate the new performances to see if the app can be faster or more fluid.

And what do you think about Xamarin.Forms 4.0?