Unlock Swift App Development with Rider

Developing swift and efficient Xamarin applications just got easier! With Rider, you can create, work with, and deploy mobile apps targeting Android and/or iOS devices. In this article, we'll dive into how to get started with Rider, what tooling is available, and provide an overview of the features that make it a powerful productivity kit for .NET and game developers.

What is Swift App Development?

Rider is built on top of ReSharper's coding intelligence for C# and VB.NET code. It also shares technology and tooling with the IntelliJ platform, specifically Android Studio (Android) and AppCode (iOS/macOS). This means that if you're familiar with working with Android Studio or AppCode, many features in Rider will feel familiar.

What do We Need to Install?

To start developing Xamarin applications with Rider, we'll need a few essential components installed. First, make sure the Xamarin Android support plugin is installed. If it wasn't included during Rider installation, you can find it in the settings under Plugins. Next, we'll need the Xamarin SDK installed, which provides the necessary build targets and libraries for developing mobile apps.

Project Templates

Once we have the required SDKs and tooling installed, we can start working on our code. Rider comes with templates for applications, libraries, and unit test projects. We can choose from various options such as targeting Android or iOS, selecting the type of application (e.g., native Android), and more.

Code Completion, Analysis, Refactoring, Navigation

A great part of developing an application is spent coding. Rider's editor provides code completion, code analysis, refactoring, navigation, and more. With over 2200 code inspections and hundreds of context actions, we can write better code faster. Rider also keeps track of how our project fits together, providing smart recommendations on how to improve our code.

Visual Designer for AXML Files

When targeting Android, we can build our application's activities using AXML. We can edit the AXML syntax directly or make use of the visual designer where we can drag and drop components and design interactions. There is also a component tree that displays how our components are structured.

Xamarin Forms / XAML

Rider comes with a rich XAML editor that helps us craft our UI for both Android and iOS applications. We can navigate back and forth between our views and related code using Ctrl+Click or Navigate To… (Alt+` using the Visual Studio keymap).

Debugging and Deploying Xamarin Applications

Rider also helps us with debugging and deploying Xamarin applications, whether to an emulator or a real device. When we want to Run/Debug our app (F5 or Ctrl+Shift+Alt+R), we'll be able to do so seamlessly.