Hey there, I am James Montemagno a developer evangelist at Xamarin. I have been developing native apps with Xamarin for nearly 4 years now across iOS, Android, and of course Windows (I was a customer for 2 years before joining Xamarin). I just wanted to clarify a bit about Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms. It is important to know that Xamarin.Forms is a cross platform UI layer that sits on top of the core Xamarin platform. Using native Xamarin you are still sharing your backend C#/.NET code and then building out native user interfaces for each platform.

The Xamarin.Forms library adds an abstraction over common controls available on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. Xamarin.Forms is extremely extensible, but it is not for every app, especially if you need a lot of custom UI or API access. For data entry, proofs-of-concept, or other simple apps it is great and we have a guide to help you select: http://cdn1.xamarin.com/Architecture%20Selector.pdf. The nice thing here is that either approach can use a shared-code backend.

I think I can address some of your concerns below:

1.) I would love to know which components you were having issues with and I can work with the team. There are a lot of settings in Visual Studio and Xamarin Studio as far as when to break on exceptions so I would love to help out here.

2.) If you are exclusive to using Xamarin.Forms then yes you will have a limited set of controls, since Xamarin.Forms is a subset of common controls. It is extensible via “CustomRenderers”, but that require some work and if you need a lot of them then it might be worth looking into the native approach without Xamarin.Forms as this approach will automatically give you access to every control on each platform you are creating.

3.) We are always looking to expand our documentation across all of our products and highly recommend checking out our updated developer portal: http://developer.xamarin.com there is a plethora of Xamarin.Forms related documentation as well as http://developer.xamarin.com/guides/cross-platform/xamarin-f... It is pretty extensive, but if there is something missing please please please let us know and we will work with the documentation team to add it. In addition to this documentation we do have a book that has been written by Charles Petzold on Xamarin.Forms that is freely available: http://developer.xamarin.com/guides/cross-platform/xamarin-f...

4.) For XAML intellisense it is built right into Xamarin Studio, for Visual Studio there is an extension that you can install: http://www.cazzulino.com/mobileessentials.html This will be integrated automatically in the future. I apologize that this is tricky to find.

Hopefully this helps out a bit with some of the issues that you have run into, but again please please feel free to email me with any questions, encounter any problems please reach out to us so we know and can fix them. You have my direct line: james@xamarin.com.