Xamarin has announced version 4 of their platform for building cross-platform native mobile apps for iOS and Android in C#. New in this version are the GA of Insights, a Recorder for the Test Cloud and several enhancements to the Platform: Xamarin.Forms 2.0, better support for iOS in VS, support for Android Material Design and more .NET code.
Xamarin Insights
Perhaps the biggest news in this version of Xamarin is moving Insights to GA, offering developers the possibility to monitor their applications in real time, providing exception, error, crash and bottleneck reporting. Insights makes it possible to get stack traces and analyze the behavior of an application to determine the cause of potential problems. Insights is available for iOS, Android, Xamarin.Forms, Windows 8.0, Windows Phone, Windows 8.1.
Currently, Insights works only with the Xamarin platform, but plans are to make it work with other crash reporting libraries. The service has a free version, a paid one for businesses and one for enterprises.
Xamarin Test Cloud
A new addition to the Test Cloud, the platform for automated testing of applications on over 2,000 actual devices, is Test Recorder. Currently available for Mac OS X, Test Recorder monitors the user’s interactions with a device and records all the steps an application is going through for later playback, generating scripts for testing the app in the Test Cloud. Recorder uses Xamarin.UITest 1.0, an automated UI testing framework based on Calabash.
Xamarin Platform
Among others, new in Xamarin 4 is Forms 2.0 coming with support for precompiled screens, iOS 9, Google’s Material Design, gestures like pinch and pull-to-refresh, and preview support for Universal Windows Applications.
Development for iOS can be done entirely from Visual Studio which communicates with a Mac machine via a SSH connection to build the code.