vendredi 1 mars 2019

XAMARIN Tizen for Tvs and .NET Standard 2.0 [2019][XAML, C#]

My return of Experience on XAMARIN for TIZEN TVs the 1st of March 2019

Here is documentation where you can find about Xamarin Forms for Tizen:

Having reseted my laptop since last time I had used Xamarin Tizen I needed to go through the all the different steps to re install Tizen, you can find the full steps here:

TIP: took me 10 minutes to figure out why I could not create an emulator image , make sure that in your package manager you install the Tizen 4 TV emulator and the Tizen SDK tools. Under Extensions SDK make sure you also select TV extensions, the download of all of the SDK and emulators can take up quite a long time so in the mean time I had recommended that you head over to Microsoft Docs for Tizen for some light reading =).

My Findings:

Last year when I used the Preview of Xamarin for Tizen here where my initial findings, you had the sensation that the SDK was not fully finish (being a preview that seemed normal), the emulator was very buggy and often crashed, the debugger did not work (unable to set a break point).

Framework versions:

  • Tizen.NET (5.0.0.14562)
  • Tizen.NET.Sdk (1.0.1)
  • Xamarin.Forms(3.6.0.26487)


The application that I built is on one page for now, it receives and formats my data into a a list that contains a list. It will populate a ListView, this first ListView data template will hold another ListView so that we can show data horizontally (imagine the Netflix application).

Universal Windows Platform (UWP) 

When creating this application I first started by the UWP as I thought it would be quicker,  the first issue that I was that the debugger did not want to stop on my break points I had the follow error:

"The breakpoint will not currently be hit. No symbols have been loaded for this document"

which is not practical (at all!).

To fix this issue I removed all of the bin and obj folders in my UWP app and removed this options
Debug=>Options=>General => Remove the check mark for "Enable Just My Code"
and it did the trick for me.

Here is what it looks like on the UWP app:


Not pretty but it gets the job done.

Next on Tizen for TV

For the Tizen, application the debugger is still "weak", it will break on you often unfortunately, another issue I found was that I was not not able to move the debug back when it hit a break point.

After a sometime even Visual Studio was telling me that something was wrong:


To be fair it was not all doom and gloom because the debugger did work sometimes:

And you could go inside the properties and investigate, this is a great improvement over the last time I tested this platform. On other issue that I found was that the debugger did not resurface errors, even when explicitly crating an error it never surfaced it.

When launching the app in the Tizen Emulator it can take a few seconds for everything to lunch.

Here is what the same app looks like in the Tizen emulator:

 It would seem that some of the binding elements are not 100% finished, none of the images will load. Also navigating inside the app is very very slow, from what I am seeing you might better off buying a Samsung TV to debug then using the emulator!

All in all here are a summary of my findings:

  1. Tizen 5 Tv SDK is working much better then the Tizen 4 Tv Sdk
  2. The emulator really works this time (last year I needed hacks to get it working), however only the version 5 worked for me and not the version 4, also you must arm yourself with patience for the app to load.  Everything is very lagy in the emulator.
  3. the debugger from Visual Studio is now working"ish", it can crash your Visual Studio but at least this time around you cant setup break points in your code.
  4. Binding still seems to be an issue, maybe this is a Xamarin issue ill have to investigate