Probably the most requested template and most used is a nice Navigation Drawer sample with everything you need including images in your navigation drawer and proper selector colors for older API levels. The first template creates a standard blank app, but adds all resource files for you automatically for theming as well as some simple navigation.

So I worked all day and night Sunday to update my Templates pack to bundle in a bunch of AppCompat project templates, and also extended the item templates to include AppCompat versions. While these were great at the time the entire Android ecosystem has shifted towards AppCompat for Material Design in apps. I like the templates that come installed with Xamarin, however the flexibility of Visual Studio to easily create project and item templates led me to creating this pack which included: The Properties window contains all selected controls’ properties.During my Effective Navigation in Android talk at last years Xamarin Evolve I had the opportunity of showcasing my Xamarin.Android Templates Pack for Visual Studio, which you can get from the Visual Studio Gallery under “Tools->Extensions and Updates”. The Toolbox window contains almost all common Android controls. The design of the UI could be done with Drag and Drop.

The created project seems to be an ordinary Android project, except that the Activity object is now a C# class and project references to. It’s possible to download and install other SDK levels. Choosing “Android application” will create a project targeting API level 10. To create an Android application in Visual Studio, select New Project -> Android, then chose the API version you want. MSDN subscribers have a better chance to try the full version for 30 days.Ī good news has come out on March 19th, there will be a free version for open source projects contributors where you may apply here. Download XamarinĪ 1 month trial version is available for download. And, it could be installed in Visual Studio as an extension to benefit from all of its powerful tools. In fact, Xamarin has its own IDE, which is Xamarin Studio. NET developers! It is now possible to use Visual Studio to build applications for Android and iOS. What is really nice is that it uses C# and Visual Studio 2013, the perfect combination for most. Xamarin is a project for building cross-platform applications.

Android visual studio