The recently released Xamarin.Studio 5.9 adds support for C# 6, improvements to Sketches, new debugger’s visualizers, and more.
C# 6 Support
C# 6 will be officially released in Visual Studio 2015, which is only available as Community Edition. Still, Xamarin.Studio already supports C# 6 new features, such as:
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?null-conditional operator, which allows to safely dereference an optional variable:name?.Substring(' '); -
string interpolation, e.g.,
string.Format ($"{fname} {lname}"); -
lamba-arrow operator for single-methods expressions, which allows to define properties and methods in a single statement:
public string Fullname => string.Format ("{0} {1}", fname, lname); public override string ToString() => string.Format("{0}, {1}", lname, fname)
InfoQ has already covered C# 6 new features previously.
New project dialog
The project dialog has been redesign to allow an easier selection of the desired template and allows for a better handling of platform specific options. Furthermore, the new WatchKit wizard makes it easier to select the parent project for your WatchKit extension and whether it supports a glance and/or notifications.
Improved debugger experience
The new C# debugger that comes with Xamarin.Studio 5.9 adds new data inspectors for types such as strings, points, sizes, rectangles, colors, map locations, images, etc. Furthermore, inspecting a variable has become easier thanks to a new “eye” tool that you can hover over to get the inspector displayed.
Besides that, Xamarin.Studio 5.9 also adds many improvements to Sketches, which is a live coding evironment able to provide a live display of produced data, and to iOS Designer tool, which is a visual designer for Storyboards.