Back in .NET Conf 2017 The Xamarin team already shared what’s going to be new with Xamarin Forms 3.0 and it actually surprised me. I was expecting some performance improvements, bug fixing and a big upgrade on XAML. But, what they announced focuses on enabling the usage of Xamarin.Forms in more ways and on more platforms. I was really hoping for XAML improvements, maybe add some cascading styling like how CSS works. Maybe sometime in the future, we’ll get it. For now, I’ll just use the XAMLCss by warapa. Anyway if you want to watch all sessions from .NET Conf 2017, you can check it out on Channel9. Going back, I really didn’t expect these new features, but definitely, I love it and really excited to try it out!

That’s why right now, I’m going to show to you one of the exciting features added to the Xamarin.Forms 3.0 that I think you’ll also love. I’m talking about Xamarin.Form’s macOS support.

A chat room to discuss Xamarin.Mac exists on Discord. Obtaining Xamarin.Mac Xamarin.Mac is available as part of Xamarin Studio or Visual Studio to download your package.

One of the Xamarin team’s plan is to reach more platforms. That means UWP, iOS and Android are not only platform the Xamarin.Forms will be able to target from now on, they are also bringing macOS, GTK#, Linux and WPF!

Visual Studio for Mac is now available Visual Studio for Mac has all the features of Xamarin Studio, and much more! You can now delete the Xamarin Studio app from your machine. I've been a VS developer for years on Windows and still use it for server-side development. Xamarin.Mac exposes the complete macOS SDK for.NET developers to build native Mac applications using C#.

You might think that it will be hard and will take a lot of time to integrate your Xamarin.Forms solution into the macOS project, but it’s not. Not at all. You’ll be able to create a native macOS application using your Xamarin.Forms solution using Visual Studio for Mac or Xamarin Studio in just 3 quick steps!

First step: Add a Cocoa App project

Create a new Xamarin.Forms app in Visual Studio for Mac and add the required references to Telerik assemblies. If your scenario requires creating a new app from scratch, please proceed following the steps below: Open Visual Studio for Mac, then create new project from the Multiplatform section select App- Xamarin.Forms- Blank Forms App. Nevron Open Vision (NOV) for MonoMac and Xamarin.Mac includes a complete set of UI Controls & Components for developing professional Mac OS applications with.NET and C#. The NOV Framework features an extensive GUI Toolkit and comes with hundreds of examples with C# source code, available for MonoMac and Xamarin.Mac.

Right now, Xamarin.Forms template doesn’t have a Cocoa App initially. So, what you would do is to start Visual Studio for Mac or Xamarin Studio and open your existing Xamarin.Forms solution. Then, add a project into the solution by right-clicking the solution and selecting Add > Add New Existing Project.

You can then select Mac > App > Cocoa App and name it whatever you want, but ideally, the name has a suffix of .macOs.

Second Step: Add the Xamarin.Forms NuGet Package

You will have to add the Xamarin.Forms’ latest pre-release nuget package or specifically 2.4.0.282. To do this, right click the Cocoa App project that you just created and select Add > Add Nuget Packages.

Then, search for ‘Xamarin.Forms’ and make sure that the ‘Show pre-release packages’ is ticked. Click ‘Add’ to add Xamarin.Forms nuget package.

You will also need to update the Xamarin.Forms on your shared project and the version should be the same with what the Cocoa app have.

Third Step: Configure the Cocoa App Project

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The first thing that you should do with your Cocoa app project is to add the shared project into your Cocoa app as a reference.

Then, open the Info.plist and remove the ‘Main storyboard file base name’ entry (Opened with XCode)

Or just open the Info.plist inside Visual Studio or Xamarin Studio by clicking it and leave the Main Interface blank.

The next one is to update your Main.cs’ Main method to initialize the AppDelegate:

Lastly, update the AppDelegate by changing the NSApplicationDelegate to FormsApplicationDelegate:

Initialize the Cocoa app window within the constructor:

Then inside the DidFinishLaunching method, initialize Xamarin.Forms and load the application:

Xamarin Studio For Mac Osx

You can now set your project as the startup project and run your macOS!

Again, in just 3 quick steps, it’s done!

Xamarin Studio For Mac Os Versions

This is just a basic walkthrough since this is still on preview. Expect that there are still bugs and not ready for production. Not all nuget packages are compatible and surely, there are lots of UI features still not implemented, but this is a good start. For now, you can send your issues and problems that you encounter in this forum discussion: https://forums.xamarin.com/discussion/93585/preview-xamarin-forms-for-macos/p1