Visual Studio + Xamarin + XAML: Quick tips for boosting productivity

Developing mobile apps is cool, and developing them fast is super cool. In this brief post, I'll introduce you to some integrated tools that work really well with Visual Studio + Xamarin combo.

If you are like me, and follow Xamarin recommendations in general, you probably make your user interfaces in XAML rather than doing them in code. By default, Visual Studio (2015) doesn't have very good support for XAML and it is a pain to write complex user-interface-markup in VS. Luckily, I recently discovered some really good tools that have drastically improved my development experience writing XAML on VS2015 and I am sharing them here so that everyone can take benefit from them for free (click to open links).

1. XAML Power Toys
2. XAML Magic

XAML Magic, in particular, is very handy if you want to keep you XAMLs clean and consistent across multiple files. It formats XAML really well and also automatically sort attributes by importance which is a nifty and useful feature. Also, an important thing to do is to change your default editor for XAML file. You can do this by right clicking on a XAML file, selecting Open With and in editor selection window, you will need to select Source Code (Text) Editor (don't forget to set it as default as well). You may need to close all the running VS instances and start again in to make these changes work properly.

You may also want to add Productivity Power Tools 2015 extension to your arsenal which has some awesome tools to improve your overall productivity inside VS2015.

I hope this post helps you guys. Looking forward for your feedback in comments. Thanks!