Xamarin Workbooks provide a blend of documentation and code that is perfect for experimentation, learning, and creating guides and teaching aids.

Create a rich C# workbook for .NET Core, Android, iOS, Mac, or WPF, and get instant live results as you learn these APIs. Workbooks also have access to the vast NuGet package ecosystem to make learning new APIs a breeze.

• Download Latest Public Release for Mac
• Download Latest Public Release for Windows

• Workbooks Documentation
• Live Inspection Documentation
• Sample Workbooks

• Discuss in Xamarin Forums
• File Bugs

macOS	Windows

We generally track the latest (usually stable, but sometimes preview) releases of the Visual Studio / Xamarin release cycles. Below are complete sets of dependencies for building Workbooks on macOS and Windows. The dependency lists are generated by our VSTS build machines.

Ensure git submodules are up-do-date:

git submodule sync
git submodule update --recursive --init

Any edition of Visual Studio or Visual Studio for Mac can be used to develop, build, and run Xamarin Workbooks by opening the top-level Xamarin.Interactive.sln solution. The entire solution is shared on macOS and Windows, so you will need to set the solution platform appropriately in Visual Studio:

It is recommended that your local builds use the default Debug solution configuration.

Finally, building from the command line is straightforward on both macOS and Windows. Unlike when building from Visual Studio, building directly via Build.proj does not require the solution platform (/p:Platform) to be set manually.

msbuild Build.proj

Our top-level Build.proj MSBuild project has a number of useful targets:

If you want to build a Release build on Windows (for example, you want to build an installer), you will need to build in a slightly different fashion. First, make sure that you connect to a Mac build host via Visual Studio at least once. You can do this by doing the following:

• Open Visual Studio
• Go to Tools → Options → Xamarin → iOS Settings
• Click "Find Xamarin Mac Agent"
• Select a Mac on your network, or add one by name
• Enter credentials when prompted

Once the connection completes, click OK to close all the dialogs. Then, build the Release configuration by running the following:

msbuild Build.proj \
  /p:MacBuildHostAddress="<hostname-or-ip-of-your-mac>" \
  /p:MacBuildHostUser="<mac-username>" \
  /p:Configuration=Release /t:Build,Install

This is needed because the installer build now needs a zipped copy of the Xamarin.iOS workbook app from the server. The Xamarin.Workbooks.iOS project will do the build and copy automatically when a Mac build host is used. If you are building in Debug, you can omit those properties unless you need the Workbook app to be copied locally, in which case, include them there as well.

Note: the build will read properties from Build/Local.props as well, for example:

<Project>
  <PropertyGroup>
    <MacBuildHostAddress>porkbelly</MacBuildHostAddress>
    <MacBuildHostUser>aaron</MacBuildHostUser>
  </PropertyGroup>
</Project>

This project welcomes contributions and suggestions. Most contributions require you to agree to a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) declaring that you have the right to, and actually do, grant us the rights to use your contribution. For details, visit https://cla.microsoft.com.

When you submit a pull request, a CLA-bot will automatically determine whether you need to provide a CLA and decorate the PR appropriately (e.g., label, comment). Simply follow the instructions provided by the bot. You will only need to do this once across all repositories using our CLA.

This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact opencode@microsoft.com with any additional questions or comments.

Official builds and releases of Xamarin Workbooks & Inspector from Microsoft collect usage data and send it to Microsoft to help improve our products and services. Read our privacy statement to learn more.

Users may opt out of telemetry and usage data collection from the Preferences dialog.

Non-Microsoft builds do not enable telemetry collection at all.

Xamarin Workbooks & Inspector incorporates open source code from external projects. See ThirdPartyNotices.txt for attribution.