Missing Templates in Latest Xamarin Visual Studio 2017

Question

I wanted to start Cross Mobile App Development for that I had heard Xamarin is a good framework if you are good with C# , so , I had downloaded the latest Visual Studio 2017 with Xamarin module installed, for learning I got the Udemy Course for Xamarin and its the latest one, so my question is in the videos and most of the tutorials out there are many templates which are missing in my Visual Studio so to make it simple I want to ask you guys that am I having the correct templates and the videos I'm referring to are old please clarify them I will post the screenshots of my setup and the video's setup.

**PS. Please excuse my novice I just started it and Google just got me confused ** Here is my Setup:

I'm just asking since to learn I need to have the same setup if there's some dissimilarity then I won't be able to have a heads up.

Answer 1

Microsoft keep on improving VS and Xamarin. Yesterday I updated VS 2017 to version 15.8.4 and now I see a difference also between your screen Jordy Dieltjens and mine as below, you have "UI Technology" to the left bottom corner and instead I have "Platform". Also you have "Portable Class Library (PCL)" under "Code sharing strategy" to the right bottom corner where I have ".Net Standard" instead. as per my knowledge PCL is now deprecated and replaced with .Net Standard which is supposed to do the same.

Answer 2

First off welcome to the Xamarin world.

Secondly your templates that you have are correct. They simply changed up a bit in visual studio 2017. For instance, if you want to create a PCL ( Portable Class Library ) project, you select cross-platform app and click ok. Than you get following screen:

Here can select your coding strategy ( I chose PCL in screenshot ).

If more questions don't hesistate to ask and goodluck ;)