Requirements

The Xamarin.Forms Previewer is available in the stable channel as a Preview. Projects require the latest Xamarin.Forms NuGet package for the XAML Previewer to work.

There is more information in the release notes.

Getting Started

Xamarin Studio on Mac

The Preview button can be displayed on the editor by right-clicking a XAML file, and selecting Open With > XAML Viewer. The preview pane can then be shown or hidden by pressing the Preview button in the top-right corner of any XAML document window:

Visual Studio on Windows

Use the View > Other Windows > Xamarin.Forms Previewer menu in Visual Studio to open the preview window. Use the Window > New Vertical Tab Group menu to position it side-by-side.

Preview Options

The options along the top of the preview pane are:

• Phone – render in a phone-size screen
• Tablet – render in a tablet-size screen (note there are zoom controls at the bottom-right of the pane)
• Android – show the Android version of the screen
• iOS – show the iOS version of the screen
• Portait (icon) – uses portrait orientation for the preview
• Landscape (icon) – uses landscape orientation for the preview

Adding Design-Time Data

Some layouts may be hard to visualize without any data bound to the user interface controls. To make the preview more useful, assign some static data to the controls by hardcoding a binding context (either in the code-behind or using XAML).

Refer to James Montemagno's blog post on adding design-time data to see how to bind to a static ViewModel in XAML.

Troubleshooting

Check the issues below, and the Xamarin Prerelease Forum, if you encounter problems with the preview.

XAML Preview isn't showing

This is a "Preview" release, so it may not always work as expected.

• Project should be built (compiled) before attempting to preview XAML files.
• The Designer Agent must be set-up the first time you preview a XAML file - a progress indicator will appear in the Previewer, along with progress messages, until this is ready.
• Try closing and re-opening the XAML file.

Invalid XAML: The Android project needs to built before preview can be created

The previewer requires that the project be built before rendering a page. If the error below appears at the top of the preview pane, re-build the application and try again.