Normally I don’t bother posting anything about the progressive updates that roll out for Visual Studio 2017 but version 15.5 adds a bunch of new features that are set to make app development using Xamarin just that little bit nicer. Pierce has a great post covering a lot of the relevant updates – https://blog.xamarin.com/whats-new-visual-studio-2017-version-15-5/
Over the last 6-12 months the debugging experience for Xamarin applications on both iOS and Android has got significantly better. I posted recently about my discovery that the Google Android emulator was actually quite good (https://nicksnettravels.builttoroam.com/post/2017/10/11/Hey-who-moved-my…-Visual-Studio-Emulator-for-Android.aspx), and whilst the build and deploy process is still painfully slow on Android, it’s definitely getting better. Now with Live XAML Previewing supported in the emulator, at least the iteration whilst making UI changes will be quicker.
I’ve also been using the remote iOS simulator – particularly at home where I use a remote build server that is on the other side of the room, it’s painful to have to deploy to a real device. I have seen some issues where debugging with the remote iOS simulator seems to just lock up but I think that was only an issue in the preview of VS mixed with the latest Windows Insider build (unfortunately neither team seems to care much about stability with their preview builds 
).
Whilst I’m talking about doing iOS development, the other significant improvement in 15.5 is the messaging regarding connecting to the Mac build agent. In the past this has been limited to success/fail; if you wanted any more details you really had to go hunting in the log files (usually it ended up being a result of a mis-match of SDK versions between the build agent machine and the machine with VS installed). The dialog for connecting to the Mac build agent has a nice progress information pane at the bottom that shows what step the connection manager is at and reports any issues – nice work MS, this is really, really useful!
Ok, I can’t end this post without pointing to the fact that Microsoft has finally worked out how to get the elephant out of the corner of the room, and by this I mean the support for PCLs v’s .NET Standard for new projects. Prior to this release if you created a new Xamarin project it would create a PCL for your shared code (and yes, I’m ignoring the Shared Project option, cause this should never be selected), and it was rather painful to have to upgrade it to .NET Standard (see https://nicksnettravels.builttoroam.com/post/2017/08/26/Getting-Started-Xamarin-Forms-with-NET-Standard.aspx if you’re still on an older version of Visual Studio). Now when you create a new Xamarin project you get a .NET Standard library and you can pick which target platform(s) you want to target (I would encourage you to pick all, unless you have a particular reason not to!).
Grab the latest version of Visual Studio 2017 and get coding!