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Announcing .NET mobile Debugging in VS Code. Mobile development in VS Code with Uno Platform or .NET MAUI.

Uno Platform Team
Published May 2, 2023

Last year we announced the preview of the Uno Platform extension for Visual Studio Code. With the initial preview, you could develop WebAssembly applications using C# & XAML, including all the goodness of XAML & C# Hot Reload and IntelliSense-like autocompletion.

Today we are adding mobile targets to our VS Code Extension, including the ability for mobile debugging. Just like in a fully-fledged IDE like Visual Studio, you can now set breakpoints, exceptions, conditional breakpoints, logpoints and variables in your code or 3rd party code using SourceLink and sources embedded inside PDB.

The best part – the mobile debugging story works for both Uno Platform and .NET MAUI mobile targets!

You can go ahead and download the extension now or dig deeper into the features below.

Develop in the environment of your choice. Remote connect to others

Whether you prefer working from Windows, macOS or Linux, you can use VS Code to develop .NET-based Uno Platform applications.

Want to build for specific targets not available from your OS? Use VS Code to connect to a remote instance of VS Code. For example, this allows you to use Linux or to debug an iOS application running on a remote macOS computer. Interaction with the iOS simulator can be done using VNC and macOS screen-sharing applications.

Re-use Your Skills

Maybe you prefer to use different operating systems depending on the target platform. VS Code and our extension behave almost identically between every OS (some key bindings might differ, and 3rd party extensions support can also vary per platform). The skills you learn on VS Code (and its extensions) are reusable across other operating systems.

Uno Platform Extension for VS Code Capabilities Chart

Here is the summary of all the features we are bringing for .NET developers for Desktop, Web and Mobile targets:

Application Type	Build & Run	Debug	Code completion / Intellisense
iOS	✓	✓	✓
Android	✓	✓	✓
MacCatalyst	✓	✓	✓
Web / WebAssembly	✓	✓	✓
Linux	✓	✓	✓

Application Type	XAML Hot Reload	C# Hot Reload
iOS	✓	Coming very soon
Android	✓	Coming very soon
MacCatalyst	✓	Coming very soon
Web / WebAssembly	✓	✓
Linux	✓	✓ (without debugger)

Jump to the Get Started on VS Code to start your journey.

Build and Debug .NET MAUI Mobile Apps Using VS Code

Uno Platform applications are .NET applications, built on the same solid foundation as .NET MAUI. Not surprisingly this means our extension also works for building and debugging MAUI applications. Even applications made directly from the dotnet SDK for iOS, macOS and Android can be built and debugged.

Summary & Next Steps

VS Code was always meant to be a code editor, but developer community has extended it with numerous extensions which nowadays provide developer productivity comparable to a fully-fledged IDE such as Visual Studio. Download our VS Code extension now, try building some apps and let us know what you think about it at our GitHub Repo.

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