The easiest way to have it installed is to download and install the latest Visual Studio. To get started with Xamarin.Forms for Visual Studio you need to have the Xamarin plugin itself. The user interfaces are rendered using the native controls of the target platform, allowing Xamarin.Forms applications to retain the appropriate look and feel for each platform. Xamarin.Forms is a cross-platform natively backed UI toolkit abstraction that allows developers to easily create user interfaces that can be shared across Android, iOS, Windows, and Windows Phone. Then, in the Visual Studio toolbar, click the Start button (the green triangular button that resembles a Play button) to launch the application on the targeted simulator/emulator. Now simply right-click the project you want to start ( HelloWorld.Droid or HelloWorld.iOS ) and click Set as StartUp Project. HorizontalTextAlignment = TextAlignment.Center, As seen below, the Content s of the sample is a StackLayout which contains a Label : using Xamarin.Forms Open the App.cs located in the root of the portable project and investigate the code. Having created the solution, a sample application will be ready to be deployed.