Xalami

Nobody loves boilerplate, especially if feels like you rewrite it every time you start a new project. Xalami is a starting point for Xamarin Forms projects that includes a lot of elements you'll use in every project. It's also delicious!

Included in the project are such tasty goodies as:

• An emphasis on MVVM
• A simple localization framework based on .resx files
• A Navigation service which wraps a Xamarin Forms NavigationPage, support parameter passing, and navigation by View type or ViewModel type.
• Several useful XAML markup extensions
• An ItemsStack control
• And more!

Getting Started with Xalami

Check out the Getting Started page on the wiki!

Or...

Windows

...just dive in and download it from the Visual Studio Marketplace.

You can also download it directly from inside the Visual Studio. Go to Tools -> Extension Manager -> Online, and search for Xalami. After you install it, when you go File -> New -> Project, Xalami will be in your list under Visual C# -> Cross-Platform.

Mac OSX

...get it from the Releases in the repo.

We're working on getting an addin uploaded to the Xamarin Studio/VS for Mac addin gallery!

Philosophy

Xalami is lightweight but opinionated. This means that we expect you to use the template as a starting point, and not a heavyweight framework that you must conform to. Xalami does however expect you to follow a few basic tenets:

• You app is based around an MVVM architecture
• You have a centralized navigation service
• You have one ViewModel per view, and a view corresponds roughly to a single "page" in your app
• You use XAML to define your UI

Contributing

Guidelines

[TBD]

Building

The Installer

The installer is made up of three projects:

• The Xalami.TemplateGenerator project which generates a small .exe which is responsible for converting the runnable project into something packageable into a .vsix or .mdpack IDE extension.
• The Xalami.VsixInstaller project, which generates a .vsix installer for Visual Studio.
• The Xalami.XamarinStudioAddin project which generates (or will, anyway) an .mdpack installer for Xamarin Studio.

In order to create a .vsix or .mdpack, first the Xalami.TemplateGenerator project must be built:

• git clone the repository.
• Right-click the Xalami.TemplateGenerator project and select Build. This will create a Xalami.TemplateGenerator.exe, which will be copied into the TemplateGeneratorTool under the repository's root directory.
• Then, simply right-click the project which builds the extension you're interested in and select Build!

Credits

Much love to Futurice for making this possible.

Proudly sponsored by Futurice's Spice Program (and its mascot, the Chilicorn)

Just as much love to the Pepperoni App Kit which served as this project's inspiration.