With all the updates is easy to lose track of all the magic that you can do now in Xamarin Forms. If you developed using Forms a few months ago probably there were a lot of things that you needed a custom renderer to achieve them but now things are finally changing.

Here is a list of the best features that you probably didn’t know there is a property for it: 🙂

Shadows

Every time I got a design with shadows was very frustrating because I knew that the only way to achieve it was by using a custom renderer. I got really happy when I saw that now we have ways to customize shadows without it.

You just need to import the ios platform-specific and use the properties ios:VisualElement.IsShadowEnabled=”true”, ios:VisualElement.ShadowColor=””, ios:VisualElement.ShadowOpacity=””, os:VisualElement.ShadowRadius=””.

ios:VisualElement.ShadowOpacity=””, os:VisualElement.ShadowRadius=””.

iOS:

Android:

On Android is not as powerful as on iOS, but to be fair Android is not very flexible when it comes to shadow customization.

So here you can use the platform specific android:Button.UseDefaultShadow=”True“

iPad Modal Page Presentation

This is a popular one, generally requested by customers supporting tablets in their apps. When navigating to a modal page in an iPad instead of showing a normal modal page, you can show it as a PopUp.

To achieve this you just have to set ios:Page.ModalPresentationStyle=”FormSheet” on the modal page you want to be displayed as PopUp.

Hide the status bar on iOS

Now is very easy to hide the status bar in a specific page by just using a property you can set if you want the status bar to be shown or not on that page.

Hide the home indicator on iOS

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In the latest version of Xamarin Forms (4.0.0.425677) there’s a new feature that provides the ability to hide the Home Indicator on the page. To do it you just have to use the platform specific ios:Page.PrefersHomeIndicatorAutoHidden=”true”.

Entry power

The entries also have superpowers now, you can see new properties like CursorPosition, SelectionLength. Also on iOS, you have platform specifics to set the cursor color and adjust the text size when typing.

Button Pressed/Released Events

Now the Button has two new events to get feedback when the button has been pressed/released, those methods are useful when doing animations or in scenarios where you want to do an action when the button has been released.

This was just a summary of my favorite new properties but there’s even more, you can check more info in the official Xamarin documentation.

Final Notes

Congratulations to the Xamarin Forms team for the great job they are doing. Definitely, XF is going to the right path. Thanks 🙂