.NET mobile productivity tooling
Xamarin Hot Restart and Hot Reload are two tools that increase productivity for .NET MAUI developers. To get even better performance from your Android emulators, you can use the Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA).
Xamarin Hot Restart
Hot Restart is a Visual Studio feature to make developers more productive. It also gives us a way of running and debugging iOS apps on an iPhone without having to use a Mac connected to Visual Studio. Microsoft describes Hot Restart as follows:
To use Hot Restart, you need the following:
- Visual Studio 2019 version 16.5
- iTunes (Microsoft Store or 64-bit versions)
- An Apple Developer account and paid Apple Developer Program (https://developer.apple.com/programs/) enrollment
Hot Restart can currently only be used with .NET for iOS apps.
Read more about the current state of Hot Restart at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/xamarin/xamarin-forms/deploy-test/hot-restart.
Hot Reload
Hot Reload is a runtime technology that allows us to update our running app with the changes we are making in the IDE. There are two major flavors of Hot Reload today: XAML Hot Reload and C# Hot Reload.
XAML Hot Reload allows us to make changes to our XAML without having to redeploy our app. When we have carried out changes to the XAML, we just save the file, and it updates the page on the simulator/emulator or on a device. XAML Hot Reload is currently supported by all .NET MAUI platforms.
C# Hot Reload allows us to make changes to our code without having to redeploy our app. C# Hot Reload is like Edit & Continue; however, you do not have to be in break mode in order to apply the changes to the app. Once you have made changes to your code, you can click the Hot Reload button in the toolbar of Visual Studio and Hot Reload will update the running app. If, for some reason, the changes cannot be applied, Hot Reload will display a dialog either asking you to fix any compilation errors or, in some cases, requiring you to restart the app.
To enable XAML Hot Reload for Visual Studio on Windows, go to Tools | Options | Xamarin | Hot Reload.
To enable XAML Hot Reload for Visual Studio on Mac, go to Visual Studio | Preferences | Tools for Xamarin | XAML Hot Reload.
C# Hot Reload is only available in Visual Studio for Windows; to enable it, go to Tools | Options | Debugger | .NET / C++ Hot Reload.
Windows Subsystem for Android
If you are using Windows 11 in a supported region, you can use WSA as your debugging target instead of the Android emulators. To learn more about WSA and how to set up your machine to use it, visit https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/android/wsa/.
If you want to use WSA to debug your .NET MAUI apps, it will help if you install the WSA Barista Visual Studio extension (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Redth.WindowsSubsystemForAndroidVisualStudioExtension). This will add the Windows Subsystem for Android menu item under Tools, which will prompt you to install WSA from the Windows Store, and then automatically configure WSA and set up Visual Studio to use WSA as a device.
