Moving Plugins for Xamarin to .NET Standard

I could never imagine the amazing response to Plugins for Xamarin, those amazing little libraries that abstract away all that platform specific code into a lovely cross-platform API for iOS, Android, and Windows. They sure have grown, with hundreds of plugins being generated by the community and with tons of installs. My plugins alone have now hit 3 Million installations! With all this momentum it is a great time to look to the future, simplify plugins, and take the leap to .NET Standard.

What is .NET Standard?

Great question! Essentially think of .NET Standard as the defacto way of sharing code across all .NET Platforms including Xamarin, .NET Framework, .NET Core, and others. Essentially all of these .NET Platforms implement a standard set of APIs so you as a developer can just create a library and share it everywhere. They are the evolution, improvement, and replacement for Portable Class Libraries, and I could not be more excited about it.

I highly recommend you checkout our podcast episode of Merge Conflict, which you should totally listen to:

Merge Conflict 38: One Library to Rule Them All

The Big Move & More Platforms

There are actually two large changes that I have done to my plugins. First, each and every plugin’s “Abstractions” and Core for bait and switch have moved to .NET Standard 1.0. This means that you can easily add them into any .NET Standard library and are 100% backwards compatible with your PCL libraries! The other switch was more on the development side of the plugins, which I have moved fully to Visual Studio 2017 and C# 7. This means that all new versions of my plugins will no longer support Windows Phone 8 Silverlight, Phone 8.1 RT, or Windows Store RT (8.1). I additionally will no longer be accepting any new issues or fixing any bugs for those operating systems in any of my plugins. I don’t have the environment to maintain them so I can’t support them.

What will you support?

With the loss of these platforms comes the rise of other platforms being added into several of my plugins. All plugins today already support iOS, Android, and UWP, and I have done my best to add in macOS, tvOS, and watchOS support to plugins where they make sense, such as Settings, Connectivity, and Text to Speech.

The Brand New IsSupported Boolean!

Previously, when you installed a plugin on a platform that wasn’t supported (or you forgot to install the NuGet in the core project) and you tried to call the method it would simply throw an exception. This is still the case, but I tried to figure out a better way for developers to check to see if an implementation exists before making calls.

You can simply now call CrossPluginName.IsSupported to check if it exists. For instance:

There you have it, super simple way of checking!

Updated Android Support Libraries

In this big move I also took a big risk on deciding to make the break away from defaulting to version 23.3.0 of the Android Support Libraries in a few of my plugins. These libraries are now almost 3 years old and it is simply time to update them to the latest and greatest 25.3.1. Since you can update them now in Xamarin.Forms applications it is time! I even show you how to do it in this small Snack Pack episode of The Xamarin Show

It should be known that I don’t use Support libraries unless I absolutely have to, but if you are using Permissions, Media, Share, or Geolocator then you are going to have to update. Here is what you need to know:

Before you install or update your NuGets, ensure you have Android SDK for API 25 installed. You can watch my video on The Xamarin Show or simply click Tools->Android SDK Manager, deselect everything, and then select Android SDK 25, that is all you will need. Next, you need to go into your Android project settings and under General/Build make sure you select Android 7.0 and then go into your Manifest and set the Target to 25 too!

If you don’t do this you will see an error when trying to install the Android NuGet that you aren’t targeting the correct version of Android. That is what this error means. Go update!

Can I Haz NuGets?

As of the time of writing this article each and every Plugin for Xamarin that I have created now has a pre-release version available that introduces these changes. Over the next two weeks I will be transitioning all of them to the stable branch after a bit more testing and feedback from you!