Free Tools: Ultimate UI for Xamarin Toolbox and Control Configurators

You may have heard that Infragistics recently released version 17.1 of the Ultimate UI Controls for Xamarin. This version has some great new features for Xamarin, including a new Schedule control for all your scheduling needs and a new Sparkline chart to help you visualize data trends. 

What you may not have heard, however, is that two important parts of Infragistics Xamarin Productivity Pack are now completely free in the Visual Studio Marketplace: the Toolbox and the Control Configurators.

The Toolbox

The Toolbox lets you drag and drop items directly into your XAML, helping to speed up the creation of your page structure.

The Toolbox gives you access to all Infragistics Xamarin controls, as well as the native Xamarin controls grouped together how you need them. There also options for generating the XAML: you can simply drag and drop to get a basic snippet of the control; or you can hold down Ctrl while you drag to get extended XAML.

Learn more about the Toolbox here, then download it free at the Visual Studio Marketplace.

Xamarin Control Configurators

The Control Configurators provides a WYSIWYG dialog which is launched directly from the XAML editor and allows you to visually configure every element of a control.  As you make changes to the various properties of a control, the changes are visually updated in real time on the design surface of the Control Configurator.

The property editor in the Control Configurator helps you learn the property names, and how they change the control. All of the properties use the same name as the actual XAML behind it, but you don’t have to think about property names or what you’re missing trying to create all the XAML from scratch.

We’ve even made the data binding as simple as possible. The Create Data Binding wizard will automatically identify your page’s binding source, and provide a list of all the public properties available to you for binding.  You can also change the mode of the binding, choose a converter, and even provide your own custom format string.

When you’ve customized it to look and feel how you want, you can generate all of that XAML with the click of a button. What’s even better, you can change any of the XAML later if you decide to change something. Then when you go back into the configurator, your change will be there because of our two-way XAML parsing engine.

Learn more about the Control Configurators here, then download them free from the Visual Studio Marketplace.

To learn more about how you can create fast, beautiful, cross-platform mobile apps with Ultimate UI for Xamarin, visit our Xamarin product site, where you download a trial of all our Xamarin controls and the entire Xamarin Productivity Pack for free. Then get started with learning these tools in our tutorials geared to help you write applications fast, and be certain they run fast.