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Switching to Android Studio

I thought Xamarin.Forms and Visual Studio would be a mature and stable development environment for developing apps for Android, iOS and UWP. I was wrong.

First, as I wrote in the previous post, it does not work to start the Android Emulator from within Visual Studio. I filed a bug report towards Visual Studio and was informed that the development team is aware of the issue and are planing to release a fix on the 15.8 branch of VS. Not very prioritized to fix apparently.

Second, Xamarin.Forms defaults to using a shared project for the common, not target specific, source files. Shared C# projects uses the new .NET project system by default. The support for XAML and code behind files still has problems in the new system. So, adding new XAML files to your project will not work from within Visual Studio, manual editing of the project files are needed. Also the static code analysis does not work well with XAML files in the new project system so you will get a lot of false errors.

Third, building the Xamarin.Forms projects when targeting Android is painfully slow. It takes minutes to re-compile even a minimal change. I did some tests with Android Studio and similar changes takes a couple of seconds to re-compile compared to minutes with Xamarin.Forms.

Ok, so a lot of complaining. What to do about it? Well, since I don't need multi-platform support right now (I am only targeting Android), I searched for the recommended development suite for just Android and found Android Studio.

Android Studio, as the name implies, is solely meant to be used for building Android apps. If the Android Emulator can't be started from within Android Studio, that will be top priority to fix. Also the build times are A LOT faster than what I experienced with Xamarin.

I will have to code in Java instead of C#, but that's no biggie. Will write more on Android Studio once I have made some more progress on the app.

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