Xamarin Studio Linker

Enables Visual Studio users to edit their Xamarin 'Resource' files (such as layouts and vector drawables) in Android Studio, directly reflecting the changes inside their Visual Studio project.

Creates a temporary Android Studio project and uses a symbolic link to link your Xamarin.Android Resources folder to the temporary project, it will then conveniently launch Android Studio into the project whereby you can edit your resources (layouts, colours, vector assets, etc), any changes will instantly reflect in your Xamarin.Android project. The creation of the temporary project only occurs once per project and will continue to be used upon further usage.

Impetus

Xamarin.Android has come a long way, however the xml "designer" is pretty lackluster, by default it doesn't support ConstraintLayout, yes there is an extension for it however it just provides basic support, no where near matching the Android Studio designer. One key issue with the VS designer is that you can't specify a 0dp width for views which is required in many cases for ConstraintLayout, also there is poor 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.

• If you are having issues with the temporary project, it is located at %temp%, delete it and retry.