The Xamarin Studio layout designer

Open the Main.axml file located at Resources/layout/Main.axml from the solution explorer. Notice that the graphical layout editor will be the default layout editor. Currently, the Main.axml layout contains a button inside LinearLayout. Let's now proceed to understand the different Xamarin Studio layout designer options.

The designer content layout

The Android Studio layout designer contains two buttons: Content and Source, which are at the bottom of the designer view. These buttons allow you to switch between a visual representation of the layout (Content) and an XML source code view of the layout. This is very useful as some tasks are just quicker to edit directly in the XML source view; however, the content view is useful to view and arrange widgets.

The content view's usefulness is somewhat limited only because most of the time portions of a view must be constructed with the code at runtime; however, when the view can be specified completely in XML, the...