Visual Studio is one of the best IDEs in the world, if it's in the .NET world, it's not one of them (^_^), and the recent launch of Visual Studio 2017 strengthens this even more in terms of mobile platforms. This release includes some awesome features, including live unit testing, new refactorings, code hints, support for C# 7.0, and features to help mobile developers build better mobile apps.
Next, let's take a look at what features in Visual Studio 2017 make mobile development easier.
Visual Studio 2017 installation experience improved
The Visual Studio team has improved the overall installation experience for this release of Visual Studio 2017. The new installation process is more intuitive and touch-friendly, and most importantly, we achieve a lower disk footprint by selecting only the tools we need. We can choose the features that best suit our needs, for example mobile development only needs to include .NET, UWP or .NET Core. Install only the components you need, keeping downloads and final installation sizes to a minimum. You can get started faster than before, plus make sure you install only the features you need to start with.
Added new project templates
The core of many mobile applications is simply a list view of data fetched from the web. Visual Studio 2017 version created new templates to deal with this situation. With just a few button clicks, bootstrap your mobile projects on mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Windows 10, including tab navigation, MVVM, settings, and more. By clicking "Host in the cloud", you can realize the back-end configuration of the mobile application, and complete the client-side code for online/offline synchronization and automatic conflict resolution, which can easily take your mobile project to a new level.
Improved XAML intellisense
Any Xamarin.Forms XAML document in Visual Studio 2017 will give you a significant boost in IntelliSense. The new code completion engine supports bindings, custom properties, custom controls, converters, and more.
Forms Previewer makes previewing more intuitive
Xamarin.Forms Previewer gives us a "WYSIWYG" view of how the app looks on the device, and shows real-time updates of our changes. Visual Studio 2017 made many improvements to Xamarin.Forms Previewer to increase the range of supported controls and XAML constructs. This saves a lot of time compared to redeploying the app to the device to see the effect changes.
Publish applications seamlessly with the Archiving Tool
Usually we go through the process of developing, debugging, testing and publishing the app to the app store. By walking us through the process step by step within Visual Studio 2017, the Android Archive Manager provides us with a seamless app publishing process.
View the modification effect through the Inspector
Xamarin Inspector is a tool for Visual Studio enterprise users that allows you to immediately see the results of changes made to the user interface. For example, we don't need to re-run the app to see font changes, which improves the look and feel of our app; we just need to run the app with the Inspector and see the changes in real-time.
Add iOS Simulator for Windows
The iOS Simulator for Windows is another feature of Visual Studio 2017 Enterprise Edition. Use this feature to make your app development easier by checking out the iOS Simulator without jumping back to your Mac.
Detect problems with Profiler
Xamarin Profiler is a tool for detecting memory leaks and unused resources, etc. Visual Studio Enterprise users can leverage the power of Profiler to detect these issues before shipping the application to users.
Test Recorder帮助更好测试应用
Xamarin Test Cloud允许我们在真实的物理设备上测试我们的应用程序，以便了解应用的真实表现。需要说明的是，这是需要编写测试脚本来实现的。Visual Studio Enterprise用户可以使用Xamarin Test Recorder来记录测试过程，同时也可以将应用运行在Xamarin Test Cloud中的大量设备上进行测试。
总结
不论是.NET开发者，还是移动应用开发者，如果你还没有深入了解Visual Studio 2017，那么可以尝试使用一下这个版本的新特性和增强。
查看Visual Studio 2017新版本的新闻原文：
https://blog.xamarin.com/visual-studio-loves-mobile-developers/
Visual Studio 2017的最新下载地址：
https://www.visualstudio.com/downloads/
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