Leave this at Windows Phone 8.0 and proceed. You will then be prompted to choose the Target Windows Phone OS Version. This should be the same name as the solution. WinPhone to the end instead of iOS or Android.
Name the project the same as for the other target projects except add. Note: don’t choose Blank App (Windows Phone) because this targets Windows Phone 8.1 only and won’t work with the current version of Xamarin. Right click on the Platforms solution folder we created earlier and choose Add > New Project.įrom Store Apps > Windows Phone Apps select ‘Blank App (Windows Phone Silverlight)’. Next we need to add a Windows Phone Project. Everything will build without errors (provided they’re not yours!) This is the key thing here because you can now edit and add classes to the shared PCL class libraries and work with Xamarin.Forms without needing a Business License. Now when you build the solution it should succeed. The trick here is to close Visual Studio down, then re-open it and reload the solution. At this point if you build the solution you will still get the same errors.
Now remove the iOS and Android projects from solution by right clicking them and selecting ‘Remove’. Name the solution the same except add ‘.WinPhone’ to the end. Select the solution and then choose File > Save As from the menu. We need to create a separate solution that doesn’t contain the iOS and Android target projects but instead contains a Windows Phone project. If you try to build the solution you will get an error informing you that the project requires Xamarin Business Licence or greater. What I’m going to show you here however is based on sharing the same files in Xamarin Studio on OSX and Visual Studio on Windows.įirstly, open the solution we created in part 2 in Visual Studio on Windows.
If you are running Visual Studio on a separate PC then you will need to make sure that you have access to the same solution files that you created in Xamarin Studio, either via a network share or source control. This means I have access to the same files on my local drive in both OSX and Windows.
I run Windows on my Mac via Parallels as a Virtual Machine. We left off in Part 2 with a solution we created in Xamarin Studio.
I will show you how to get around this and allow you to develop most of your code in Visual Studio and then run and deploy it against all three target platforms. It won’t however let you build a solution that contains an iOS or Android project. Furthermore, you can then work on the shared PCL’s in that solution and build them without any problems. You can simply open an existing solution in Visual Studio, which you’ve previously created in Xamarin Studio, and add a Windows Phone project that supports Xamarin Forms. This is something that is far from clear and many developers may be excused for thinking that you need the Business Edition to target Windows Phone with Xamarin, you don’t. Although the Xamarin pricing page shows that Visual Studio support only comes with the Business Edition, this only applies to iOS and Android. This may seem like you need to have the Business Edition to do this but that is not the case. If you want to develop for Windows Phone then you need to use Visual Studio. I don’t really understand the logic here but I do think Xamarin need to reconsider this as it is only going to hamper and annoy most developers. This allows me to develop Xamarin Forms applications using Xamarin Studio for both these platforms, but not using Visual Studio. It is however a bit crazy that we have start negotiating special discounts just because the price is way to high in the first place. I have an Indie licence for both iOS and Android, for which I managed to negotiate a discount as a small business.
However, in the meantime this post will show you how to use Visual Studio to develop Xamarin Forms Applications using the Indie licence without purchasing the Business Edition If Xamarin does include Visual Studio Community support with the Indie licence then it will be great news for individual developers and small businesses who will no longer need to purchase the costly Business edition ($999 per platform) or be confined to using Xamarin Studio. It is still unclear what this means for Xamarin Forms which is currently only available with the Indie licence and above. This week Xamarin announced support for Visual Studio Community in the Starter edition. Part 11 : Updating to Xamarin Forms 1.3.Part 10 : Designing and Developing the User Interface.Part 9 : Working with Alerts and Dialogs.Part 8 : Consuming a RESTful Web Service.Part 3 : How to use Xamarin Forms with Visual Studio without the Business Edition.