It looks good but there are some errors I believe. First of all it doesnt recognize external libraries like xlabs.
another thing, i have xaml like below and although it will be rendered fine on emulator, gorillaplayer will return error.
So Gorilla player current scope is just to preview XAML, what you mentioned about xlabs is not currently supported.
We are working on the Gorilla SDK which will allow to do more complex things -like preview custom renderers-.
It is still immature but in case you could want to take a look here is a document on our Gorilla support website that explains how to use it:
I've been evaluating Xamarin the past couple of weeks. Discovering that the Xamarin.Forms, which utilizes XAML, has no designer is disheartening. It definitely takes the "rapid" out of RAD. I have used WPF with a designer, and I would guess that development time would increase exponentially without a designer.
Yes dev time is extremely long with xamarin forms. Especially starting Debugging in order to see ui changes bur still xamarin is great Tool and we hope that soon or later there will be Design Support.
I recently used The GorillaPlayer with the SDK to design some Pages and it was a great help! Almost all CustomRenderer worked with the exception of XamSVG.
So any Tool like Gorilla Player or XenForms (we'll have to see what it's worth ;-) ) is extremely helpful.
Also why I prefer coding Xaml directly is that I have real control about which LayoutComponents are used.
Xenforms looks like it's disappeared, Gorilla looks great, but it's not for Visual Studio, and Mobile Essentials could have been a contender but it has not been touched in a couple of years (aside from a couple of small updates about 7-9 months ago). Any new solutions?
Any solution will have to cope with 3rd party custom controls, they are so widely used (as they are in WPF).
I thought the designer was heading that way and even spoke to our control provider who said they'd love to work with Microsoft on it but they had no idea of their plans....
Answers
It looks good but there are some errors I believe. First of all it doesnt recognize external libraries like xlabs.
another thing, i have xaml like below and although it will be rendered fine on emulator, gorillaplayer will return error.
Hey @batmaci, thanks for your feedback.
So Gorilla player current scope is just to preview XAML, what you mentioned about xlabs is not currently supported.
We are working on the Gorilla SDK which will allow to do more complex things -like preview custom renderers-.
It is still immature but in case you could want to take a look here is a document on our Gorilla support website that explains how to use it:
https://github.com/UXDivers/Gorilla-Player-Support-And-Issues/wiki/Gorilla-SDK
And about the second issue, yes, it is a known issue that we will be fixing on next versions:
https://github.com/UXDivers/Gorilla-Player-Support-And-Issues/issues/21
I've been evaluating Xamarin the past couple of weeks. Discovering that the Xamarin.Forms, which utilizes XAML, has no designer is disheartening. It definitely takes the "rapid" out of RAD. I have used WPF with a designer, and I would guess that development time would increase exponentially without a designer.
If you have done any extensive XAML'ing in WPF, the designer becomes pretty useless.
Yes dev time is extremely long with xamarin forms. Especially starting Debugging in order to see ui changes bur still xamarin is great Tool and we hope that soon or later there will be Design Support.
I'll be releasing a public beta build of my Xamarin.Forms UI designer in mid-April.
https://www.xenforms.com
I recently used The GorillaPlayer with the SDK to design some Pages and it was a great help! Almost all CustomRenderer worked with the exception of XamSVG.
So any Tool like Gorilla Player or XenForms (we'll have to see what it's worth ;-) ) is extremely helpful.
Also why I prefer coding Xaml directly is that I have real control about which LayoutComponents are used.
Xenforms looks like it's disappeared, Gorilla looks great, but it's not for Visual Studio, and Mobile Essentials could have been a contender but it has not been touched in a couple of years (aside from a couple of small updates about 7-9 months ago). Any new solutions?
https://forums.xamarin.com/discussion/97303/where-are-the-xaml-designer-tools#latest
Any solution will have to cope with 3rd party custom controls, they are so widely used (as they are in WPF).
I thought the designer was heading that way and even spoke to our control provider who said they'd love to work with Microsoft on it but they had no idea of their plans....