Traditionally, Xamarin developers have used our updater channels to stay up-to-date with frequent Xamarin releases, previews, and updates. To enable our developers to receive updates outside of the Visual Studio release cadence, we are introducing the Xamarin Updater extension for Visual Studio 2017, which allows you to receive updates to Xamarin for Visual Studio out-of-band, such as updates to the Xamarin Live Player or support for new versions of Xcode.
Installing the Xamarin Updater
Visual Studio 2017 provides two channels: Stable and Preview. Currently, the updater requires the Preview 15.3 release and will only provide preview updates on preview installations.
- Go to Tools -> Extensions & Updates.
- Navigate to Online -> Visual Studio Marketplace.
- Search for Xamarin Updater and press Download. The extension will be marked as “Created by: Xamarin”.
- Restart Visual Studio.
With the updater installed, this is will provide you preview updates on the preview channel of Visual Studio.
Keeping Up-to-Date with Xamarin
The Xamarin Updater will automatically push updates via the Extensions and Updates window. To receive updates (if available), go to the Updates tab, and press Update for each item to download all available updates.
When the downloads have completed, a restart of Visual Studio is required to install the updates. After Visual Studio is closed, the updates downloaded above will be installed. You can follow along at releases.xamarin.com for release notes and information regarding updates shown in the Xamarin Updater and/or Visual Studio updater.
Wrapping Up
The Xamarin Updater extension for Visual Studio 2017 allows you to always be up-to-date with the latest Xamarin SDKs. This updater mechanism does not replace traditional updates to Visual Studio Stable and Preview but will supplement them. For more information, check out our documentation on changing the updater channel.
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