Xamarin productivity tooling

Xamarin Hot Restart and Xamarin Hot Reload are two tools that increase productivity for Xamarin developers.

Xamarin Hot Restart

Hot Restart is a Visual Studio feature, which is currently in preview, to make developers more productive. It also gives us a way of running and debugging iOS apps on an iPhone without having to use a Mac connected to Visual Studio. Microsoft describes Hot Restart as follows:

"Xamarin Hot Restart enables you to quickly test changes to your app during development, including multi-file code edits, resources, and references. It pushes the new changes to the existing app bundle on the debug target which results in a much faster build and deploy cycle."

To use Hot Restart, you need the following:

• Visual Studio 2019 version 16.5 or later
• iTunes (64 bit)
• An Apple Developer account and paid Apple Developer Program (https://developer.apple.com/programs/) enrollment

Hot Restart can currently only be used with Xamarin.Forms apps.

To activate Hot Restart, go to Tools | Options | Environment | Preview Features | Enable Xamarin Hot Restart.

Read more about the current state of Hot Restart at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/xamarin/xamarin-forms/deploy-test/hot-restart.

Xamarin XAML Hot Reload

Xamarin XAML Hot Reload allows us to make changes to our XAML without having to redeploy our app. When we have carried out changes to the XAML, we just save the file and it updates the page on the simulator/emulator or on a device. XAML Hot Reload is currently only supported by iOS and Android.

To enable XAML Hot Reload for Visual Studio on Windows, go to Visual Studio | Preferences | Tools for Xamarin | XAML Hot Reload.

To enable XAML Hot Reload for Visual Studio on Mac, go to Tools | Options | Xamarin | Hot Reload.

To use XAML Hot Reload, we have to use Xamarin.Forms 4.1+ with Visual Studio 2019 16.4+ (or Visual Studio for Mac 8.4+).