You're reading from .NET MAUI Projects - Third Edition

Product typeBook

Published inFeb 2024

Reading LevelN/a

PublisherPackt

ISBN-139781837634910

Edition3rd Edition

Languages

Tools

.NET MAUI

Concepts

Mobile Game Development

Authors (3):

Michael Cummings

Daniel Hindrikes

Johan Karlsson

View More author details

.NET mobile productivity tooling

Xamarin Hot Restart and Hot Reload are two tools that increase productivity for .NET MAUI developers. To get even better performance from your Android emulators, you can use the Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA).

Xamarin Hot Restart

Hot Restart is a Visual Studio feature to make developers more productive. It also gives us a way of running and debugging iOS apps on an iPhone without having to use a Mac connected to Visual Studio. Microsoft describes Hot Restart as follows:

Xamarin Hot Restart enables you to quickly test changes to your app during development, including multi-file code edits, resources, and references. It pushes the new changes to the existing app bundle on the debug target which results in a much faster build and deploy cycle.

To use Hot Restart, you need the following:

Visual Studio 2019 version 16.5
iTunes (Microsoft Store or 64-bit versions)
An Apple Developer account and paid Apple Developer Program (https://developer.apple.com/programs/) enrollment

Hot Restart can currently only be used with .NET for iOS apps.

Read more about the current state of Hot Restart at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/xamarin/xamarin-forms/deploy-test/hot-restart.

Hot Reload

Hot Reload is a runtime technology that allows us to update our running app with the changes we are making in the IDE. There are two major flavors of Hot Reload today: XAML Hot Reload and C# Hot Reload.

XAML Hot Reload allows us to make changes to our XAML without having to redeploy our app. When we have carried out changes to the XAML, we just save the file, and it updates the page on the simulator/emulator or on a device. XAML Hot Reload is currently supported by all .NET MAUI platforms.

C# Hot Reload allows us to make changes to our code without having to redeploy our app. C# Hot Reload is like Edit & Continue; however, you do not have to be in break mode in order to apply the changes to the app. Once you have made changes to your code, you can click the Hot Reload button in the toolbar of Visual Studio and Hot Reload will update the running app. If, for some reason, the changes cannot be applied, Hot Reload will display a dialog either asking you to fix any compilation errors or, in some cases, requiring you to restart the app.

To enable XAML Hot Reload for Visual Studio on Windows, go to Tools | Options | Xamarin | Hot Reload.

To enable XAML Hot Reload for Visual Studio on Mac, go to Visual Studio | Preferences | Tools for Xamarin | XAML Hot Reload.

C# Hot Reload is only available in Visual Studio for Windows; to enable it, go to Tools | Options | Debugger | .NET / C++ Hot Reload.

Windows Subsystem for Android

If you are using Windows 11 in a supported region, you can use WSA as your debugging target instead of the Android emulators. To learn more about WSA and how to set up your machine to use it, visit https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/android/wsa/.

If you want to use WSA to debug your .NET MAUI apps, it will help if you install the WSA Barista Visual Studio extension (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Redth.WindowsSubsystemForAndroidVisualStudioExtension). This will add the Windows Subsystem for Android menu item under Tools, which will prompt you to install WSA from the Windows Store, and then automatically configure WSA and set up Visual Studio to use WSA as a device.

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Authors (3)

Michael Cummings

Michael Cummings is a Senior Development Engineer with Microsoft. He currently works on the Visual Studio tooling for building WPF, Xamarin.Forms, and .NET MAUI apps. He has experience as a developer and architect with concentrations in app development, design, deployment, and business process as it relates to technology. Michael has been a graphics and game programmer since the days of the TI99-4/A. He started the Boston XNA Developers Group. He has contributed to many open-source projects, including AXIOM, a .NET/Mono 3D rendering engine, and Planeshift, a 3D MMORPG. Michael also has experience with native game and graphics development (C++/DirectX) on Windows. Michael lives in Lexington, MA with his wife and their dog. When not working with technology he enjoys watching movies, trying out new recipes, and the occasional game of full-contact racquetball.
Read more about Michael Cummings

Daniel Hindrikes

Daniel Hindrikes is a developer and architect with a passion for developing mobile apps powered by the cloud. Daniel fell in love with Xamarin in the early days of Xamarin when he realized that he could use C# even for iOS and Android apps, and that he could share code with the Windows apps he was also building. But Daniel started to build mobile apps long before that, working on Android apps with Java and even Java ME apps (a long, long time ago). Daniel enjoys sharing his knowledge and can be found speaking at conferences, blogging, or recording the podcast, The Code Behind. Daniel works at the company tretton37 in Sweden and has experience working with both local and global customers.
Read more about Daniel Hindrikes

Johan Karlsson

Johan Karlsson has been working with Xamarin since the days of MonoTouch and Mono for Android, and it all started with writing a game. He is a full-stack developer, currently focusing on mobile applications using Xamarin, but has in the past worked a lot with ASP.NET MVC, Visual Basic.NET (not proud), and C# in general. Also, he's created a whole bunch of databases in SQL Server over the years. Johan works at tretton37 in Sweden and has about 20 years' experience in the trade of assembling ones and zeros.
Read more about Johan Karlsson

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