Back in May 2019, I wrote an article about the Windows Subsystem for Linux, giving a quick overview of what it is and how to set it up. Here’s how to update your old WSL distros to use WSL 2 and to make any future installs use WSL 2 by default.

With the latest releases of iOS and Android bringing OS support for Dark and Light modes, I set out to discover how to handle this within a Xamarin.Forms app. I found some great articles by both the Xamarin team and the community, explaining how to add themes to your app and switch between them and also how to detect which theme is active in your OS. Having read these articles, there was one aspect that I hadn’t seen covered anywhere, so I thought I’d share my findings below.

This is a quick guide to getting started with Xamarin.Forms Shell. I’ll show you how to create an app using Xamarin.Forms Shell, add a Flyout menu with an image header and add a new page. I’m going to assume that you are already familiar with Xamarin.Forms and Visual Studio 2019 or Visual Studio for Mac.

XAML Hot Reload is a technology available to a number of XAML supporting platforms, including WPF, UWP, Uno and Xamarin.Forms. It speeds up development time, by removing the need to rebuild the app every time the XAML UI code is changed.

The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) provides a way of running Linux executables natively on Windows. It is available for 64-bit versions of Windows 10 and Windows Server 2019.