One of the key motivators for developing XamRight was to have a tool that would support a wide range of MVVM patterns in Xaml development without requiring additional configuration. You shouldn’t have to adapt your code to suit the tool — the tool should adapt to your code!
To do that, we developed XamRight, with a fast, powerful analysis engine that powers error checking in Xaml, autocompletion, and more. XamRight analysis is now able to fully understand over 88% of Binding expressions in this real-world testing. For developers, that means a more efficient Xaml editing process, with fewer deploy/debug cycles to fix Binding bugs.
To measure effectiveness, we’ve taken a set of open source Xamarin apps, and run “Build\Analyze Solution with XamRight” from the Visual Studio IDE. We make no modifications to the app source code, nor do we provide any hints or configuration. The numbers reported are shown in the Output window after XamRight analysis is complete, so you can evaluate on your own Xamarin apps.
The Xaml Bindings column counts the total number of “{Binding …}” expressions there are in the Xaml files in the solution. Bindings Resolved is the number of Binding expressions where XamRight was able to identify the view model. Effectiveness is the percentage of the total that were resolved, and our goal is to get as close to 100% as possible. Note that for Shared projects, each Xaml file is analyzed once per platform, so a solution with Android, iOS, and UWP targets, the reported number will be three times the number of Binding expressions actually seen in the code (Arc GIS is an example).
These results are with XamRight version 1.690.
| Name | Source code | Xaml Bindings | Bindings Resolved | Effectiveness |
| Xamarin CRM | https://github.com/xamarin/app-crm | 130 | 119 | 91.54% |
| Arc GIS | https://github.com/Esri/arcgis-runtime-samples-dotnet | 99 | 99 | 100.00% |
| Xamarin Conference | https://github.com/xamarinhq/app-conference | 263 | 226 | 85.93% |
| Conference Vision | https://github.com/Microsoft/ConferenceVision | 38 | 30 | 78.95% |
| SmartHotel 360 | https://github.com/Microsoft/SmartHotel360-mobile-desktop-apps | 212 | 168 | 79.25% |
| Xamarin Sport | https://github.com/xamarin/Sport | 228 | 199 | 87.28% |
| Coffee Cups | https://github.com/jamesmontemagno/app-coffeecups | 28 | 28 | 100.00% |
| Hunt | https://github.com/rob-derosa/Hunt | 80 | 68 | 85.00% |
| My Shoppe | https://github.com/xamarinhq/app-myshoppe | 84 | 84 | 100.00% |
| Nethereum Wallet (Uses MvvmCross) |
https://github.com/Nethereum/Nethereum.UI.Wallet.Sample | 67 | 67 | 100.00% |
| Money Fox (Uses MvvmCross) |
https://github.com/MoneyFox/MoneyFox | 335 | 299 | 89.25% |
| Overall | 1564 | 1387 | 88.68% |
We picked these apps because they were some of the best examples we could find of real apps – multiple pages, different kinds of transitions, showing many kinds of data. There are plenty of great examples of apps showing how to use individual features of Xamarin.Forms, but not in a realistic setting, so we haven’t included those. We don’t include some samples we’ve published for exactly that reason; any analysis we do on them won’t be representative of what your experience will be like using XamRight on a real project.
That being said, if there are more open source apps we should include in our testing, please let us know!
