Yesterday Xamarin 4.2 was released and with it some major features I think the majority of Xamarin devs (espacially on Windows) were waiting for:

• Xamarin.Forms Previewer
• Xamarin iOS Simulator for Windows

 

Xamarin.Forms Previewer

The Xamarin.Forms Previewer still has some issues showing non-simple XAML (e.g. with markup extensions for translation) but it makes designing Xamarin.Forms views a lot simpler. You can find the Xamarin.Forms Previewer in the Visual Studio menu:

VIEW > Other Windows > Xamarin.Forms Previewer

Xamarin iOS Simulator for Windows

To activate the Xamarin iOS Simulator for Windows you have to install it on your machine first. You can find the download (still a preview version) here:

https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/cross-platform/windows/ios-simulator/

Restart Visual Studio – don’t know if that’s really necessary but in my case VS crashed when starting the simulator. Make sure you check the activation-flag in the Visual Studio options (TOOLS > Options > Xamarin > iOS Settings) and find the checkbox „Remote Simulator for Windows“ activated.

Select the „iPhoneSimulator“ build configuration and the device and click the „Show iOS Simulator“ icon in the Visual Studio tool bar. Don’t know why but in my case there must be the right simulator running on my Mac (so if you choose „iPhone6“ in Visual Studio the iPhone6 simulator must be up and running on your Mac).

Now you can start your Xamarin iOS APP and instead of launching the iOS Simulator on your MAC the iOS Simulator for Window will popup on your dev machine. Don’t mind if the Simulator hangs in „Updating…“ or „Connected…“ for quite a few minutes – it’s going to work out fine at the end 😉