Over the past 4 days, I have been working with Xamarin here and there. I’m starting to get the lay of the land, and I may actually have some things of value to share. Here’s a quick braindump:

• When creating your Visual Studio solution/projects, start with “Blank App (Xamarin.Forms.Shared)”, this will create your “core” project containing all your common code, it will also create a project for iOS, Android and Windows Phone 8.1
• If you have chosen to use a Hackintosh, like me, you will not be able to run the Windows Phone 8.1 emulator as it requires Hyper-V and Hyper-V does not play nicely with VirtualBox
• When you create your Xamarin.Forms projects, you will need to manually edit the iOS project file as described here: https://kb.xamarin.com/customer/portal/articles/2006832-why-does-my-ios-build-fail-with-%22no-valid-iphone-code-signing-keys-found-in-keychain%22-
• ALWAYS ensure your Mac build machine is running and ready BEFORE opening Visual Studio
• Visual Studio Online supports Xamarin build, but it will not work with a trial license

That’s about it for now, just some quick tips from the trenches.