In this chapter, we learned about the Visual Studio plugin, and walked through setting up plugin, as well as binding Visual Studio to a networked Mac build machine. We discussed each of the major project templates available in Xamarin Studio, pointing out to the ones that are available when using the Visual Studio plugin. We also looked at the various library types and how they can be leveraged to reduce your development workload. Finally, we briefly examined the file types available to use in your solutions.

In the next chapter, we will take a look at the Xamarin.Forms framework newly introduced by Xamarin 3. You will learn to build a fully functional cross-platform application in just a few minutes using XAML and the UI design API included with the framework.