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Looks cool, but why translate to native UI elements at run-time as opposed to compile-time? Does it help with debugging?

Forgive my ignorance as I have not used Xamarin.

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From a technical standpoint the "translation" is pretty much a standard Model-View-Presenter approach. This allows both us and you maximum flexibility when working with and extending Xamarin.Forms. We expose to users the same API's we used to implement the initial set of controls.

From the page: "...which are mapped to native controls at runtime, which means that your user interfaces are fully native. "

I read this as "we allow design in our forms library, but compile to native controls for use at runtime."

It took me a couple reads to come to that conclusion, I was also confused by the wording. If that is not the case, I definitely have the same question as you. Perhaps the page could use some clarification.

Apple's storyboards and xib files are essentially XML serialized views. Apple deserializes them at runtime and its a feature built in to Cocoa and Cocoa Touch. Since Xamarin is just wrapping the native libraries it is easier and more compatible to just follow the same approach.

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