The ongoing Xamarin Evolve conference is generating a lot of enthusiasm amongst cross-platform developers across the globe.

Xamarin has so far showcased an Android player, a simulator with hardware acceleration that claims to be much faster than the emulator with Android SDK. It is based on OpenGL and utilizes hardware accelerated virtualization with VT-x and AMD-V. The player also relies on Virtual Box 4.3 or higher to run. It would run equally well on Windows (7 or later) and OS X (10.7 or higher). After installing the player, you can select the emulator image to run. Select the device to simulate from the Device Manager. The emulator will then run exactly like the Android SDK emulator and you can perform various actions (typical of a hardware operation) by clicking the buttons provided on the right hand side. You can also simulate operations like multi-touch, battery operations, and location controls, etc. To install your apps for testing, you can drag and drop the APK file into the player.

Another cool release is the profiler that can be leveraged to perform code analysis of the C# code and profile it for potential performance bottlenecks and leaks. The profiler performs two important tasks. It does sampling for tracking memory allocation and looks at the call tree to determine the order of calling functions. It also provides a snapshot of memory usage on a timeline allowing the administrators to gain valuable insights into memory usage patterns.

My most favourite feature so far, however, is the preview of Sketches. Sketches provides an environment to quickly evaluate code and analyse the outcome. It offers immediate results without having the need to compile or deploy and you can use it from your Xamarin Studio. More on Sketches in the next post after I install and give it a try myself.