Folks, this post is by no means meant to be a complaint. But here's my take on XF after about a month of usage:
My productivity is extremely slow. I spend about 50% of the time dealing with problems in the framework rather than focusing on my project.
-My first week was a complete write-off due to intellisense bugs and other instabilities
-Running on the iOS simulator is like my old lawn mower. It often takes two tries to start. The first time I get "Failed to start application on the target simulator"
-Quite often the breakpoints don't get hit. Extremely frustrating
-a lot of the sample projects won't run because of Nuget package dependency problems. I am able to look at the sample code though, that is helpful
-I have Win 10 and therefore cannot run on the Android Sim until the Oracle box gets fixed
-I have VS 2015 which I've read can be a problem.
-This morning I wasted 2 hours tracing a bug in my code that never was there. The app would crash and I assumed it was my bug. But I rebooted the Mac then everything was fine.
-Often the build doesn't copy to the simulator so I end up running stale code
-The Errors list is never clear. There's always red squiggles through my projects but I'm used to that now.
I'm nearing the end of my trial and have to consider very carefully if it's worth it. Or switch to XCode and revisit Xamarin in a year?????