Xamarin Studio Linker

Edit your resource files in the Android Studio/IDEA IDE and watch the changes instantly reflect in your Xamarin.Android project.

Creates a temporary Android Studio/Intellij IDEA project and uses a symbolic link which links your Xamarin.Android Resources folder with the temporary project, it will then conveniently launch Android Studio into the project whereby you can edit your resources (layout, colours, vector assets, etc), any changes will instantly reflect in your Xamarin.Android project.

Requires Visual Studio to be running as Administrator when you first use the extension for a given project (CreateSymbolicLinkW prerequisite), subsequent use does not require elevation.

Impetus

Xamarin.Android has come a long way, however the xml "designer" is pretty lackluster, by default it doesn't even support ConstraintLayout, yes there is an extension for it however it just provides basic support, no where near matching the Android Studio designer. The main points against it are the fact that you can't specify a 0dp width for views which is required in many cases for ConstraintLayout, also there is no code formatting and the auto-complete is, well, not complete 😀

Rather than implement my own layout editor, the simple and most effective solution was to use the Android Studio implementation.

Common Headaches

• If you create new files in the Android Studio IDE then you will need to make them visible to the Visual Studio project by using Add > Existing Item in the solution explorer. I would recommend just creating the files in Visual Studio if you wish to avoid this issue.