How To Migrate PCL and Xamarin.Forms Apps to NETStandard Today

One of the reasons devs don’t update their (Xamarin.Forms) PCL library projects to .NETStandard 2.0 is that there are a bunch of NuGet packages that still haven’t migrated to it. It turns out, that that’s not a problem at all!

Basically, the steps are:

1. Open your .csproj and delete everything
2. Replace its contents with:

<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk">

  <PropertyGroup>
    <TargetFramework>netstandard2.0</TargetFramework>
    <AssetTargetFallback>portable-net45+netcore45+wpa81+wp8+MonoAndroid10+MonoTouch10+Xamarin.iOS10;portable-net45+win8+wp8+wpa81;portable-win+net45+wp80+win81+wpa81</AssetTargetFallback>
  </PropertyGroup>

</Project>

1. Add an <ItemGroup> and start adding <PackageReference> for the entries in your packages.config, such as:

  <ItemGroup>
    <PackageReference Include="sqlite-net-pcl" Version="1.3.3" />
    <PackageReference Include="SQLitePCLRaw.bundle_green" Version="1.1.5" />
    <PackageReference Include="SQLitePCLRaw.core" Version="1.1.5" />
    <PackageReference Include="Xamarin.Forms" Version="2.5.0.280555" />
  </ItemGroup>

The trick of course is that new (in VS2017 15.6) AssetTargetFallback property (used to be called PackageTargetFallback). It tells NuGet restore to consider those additional target frameworks as compatible with the current project, so any package that does not provide a netstandard2.0 lib will automatically get one of those other PCL profiles instead, which should work too just fine.

So now you don’t have any more excuses for putting up with all those merge conflicts any time someone adds files to the project!

Enjoy :)