Windows Platform Features

01/16/2020

2 minutes to read





In this article

Developing Xamarin.Forms applications for Windows platforms requires Visual Studio. The supported platforms page contains more information about the pre-requisites.

Platform-specifics

Platform-specifics allow you to consume functionality that's only available on a specific platform, without implementing custom renderers or effects.

The following platform-specific functionality is provided for Xamarin.Forms views, pages, and layouts on the Universal Windows Platform (UWP):

The following platform-specific functionality is provided for Xamarin.Forms views on UWP:

The following platform-specific functionality is provided for Xamarin.Forms pages on UWP:

The following platform-specific functionality is provided for the Xamarin.Forms Application class on UWP:

Specifying the directory in the project that image assets will be loaded from. For more information, see Default Image Directory on Windows.

Platform support

The Xamarin.Forms templates available in Visual Studio contain a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) project.

Note Xamarin.Forms 1.x and 2.x support Windows Phone 8 Silverlight, Windows Phone 8.1, and Windows 8.1 application development. However, these project types have been deprecated.

Getting started

Go to File > New > Project in Visual Studio and choose one of the Cross-Platform > Blank App (Xamarin.Forms) templates to get started.

Older Xamarin.Forms solutions, or those created on macOS, will not have all the Windows projects listed above (but they need to be manually added). If the Windows platform you wish to target isn't already in your solution, visit the setup instructions to add the desired Windows project type/s.

Samples

All the samples for Charles Petzold's book Creating Mobile Apps with Xamarin.Forms include Universal Windows Platform (for Windows 10) projects.

The "Scott Hanselman" demo app is available separately, and also includes Apple Watch and Android Wear projects (using Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android respectively, Xamarin.Forms does not run on those platforms).