One of the common complaints regarding Android development, regardless of the development tool in use, is the lack of a good UI designer. The usual result is that UIs are designed in XML by hand.
The people at Xamarin have clearly taken this rather seriously and spent some time building up a new UI designer for Mono for Android projects, which is now available in the recently released Mono for Android 4.2.
The UI designer offers all the standard UI controls in the Visual Studio toolbox, and gives you the option of visual drag/drop/property editing or the more traditional manual XML editing.
Also new in 4.2 is:
- Mono for Android coverage of the Android support package, which allow you to use newer UI features in older Android releases.
- inclusion of a Java Binding Library tool to facilitate bringing in custom Java libraries.
- full support (including debugging) for Android x86 emulators (as supported by Android’s SDK Tools revision 17)
Full details of the Mono for Android 4.2 release can be found on this announcement post.
Hope that this UI designer will make our life easier at last. We have already begun using this tool here and I'm waiting for the response frm our developers - whether they like this UI designer or not.
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