Installation

The following procedure illustrates how to install Syncfusion Xamarin Extension in Visual Studio for Mac.

Follow this guideline to install the Essential Studio for Xamarin Mac build if not installed, then you will get the Visual Studio for Mac Extensions in installed location.

Location:

Eg: {Documents}Syncfusion {version}XamarinExtensionSyncfusion Xamarin VS Mac Extensions.mpack

Ship more, faster with our hand-tuned XAML editor for Xamarin.Forms. MFractor spots 90+ XAML issues, includes 100+ XAML refactorings, shows detailed tooltips to give insight into your XAML and includes dozens of code completions to make writing XAML effortless. One place for all extensions for Visual Studio, Azure DevOps Services, Azure DevOps Server and Visual Studio Code. Discover and install extensions and subscriptions to create the dev environment you need.

1. Open the Visual Studio 2019 for Mac.

2. Click the Visual Studio Community/Professional/Enterprise and select the Extensions…

3. The Extension Manager window will open. Select the Install from file…

4. The Install Extension Package dialog will open. Navigate to Syncfusion Xamarin Mac Extensions file(.mpack) location which explained in above and click open to install.

5. Once the extension installed, the Syncfusion Xamarin Extension will listed in the IDE extension section.

Introduction

Ever since I commercialised MFractor in June 2017, I've been pulled to the idea of using XAML and Xamarin.Forms to build user interfaces for Visual Studio Mac extensions.

For MFractor, developing tools like the Image Wizard or Localisation Wizard cost days to weeks of engineering effort. As a bootstrapped business, this time-cost makes it prohibitively expensive to develop tools that are UI-centric.

Therefore, there are compelling reasons to use Xamarin.Forms to build Visual Studio Mac extensions:

• XAML is much, much easier to work with than XWT, Visual Studio Macs UI framework. This dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for developing Visual Studio Mac extensions.
• We can use code and can also make use of value converters, triggers and behaviours.
• With a Xamarin.Forms WPF backend available, user interfaces are reusable in both Visual Studio MacandVisual Studio Windows.
• By using XAML to build MFractors UIs, I can use MFractor to build itself; an awesome process of dogfooding to accelerate product development.

Visual Studio For Mac Extensions Free

There are huge productivity gains here!

Vsix On Mac

To prove that this technique is valid for production-ready tooling and is not just a toy, we'll be building an image asset browser you can use to visually explore images inside a solution:

So, read on to learn how to use Xamarin.Forms inside Visual Studio Mac to build rich user interfaces for your tooling.