Our team is working on a large project that has clients for Web, Desktop, Android and iOS. The clients use shared libraries as advised all over the internet. Building for the mobile platforms is done with Xamarin on a Mac. My machine is a HP Windows laptop and does not contain the Xamarin suite. Whenever I want to view the files for the mobile platforms I have to use notepad or install the huge Xamarin suite.

With huge I mean 5Gb or more that Xamarin hogs on my SSD disk. Together with Windows, Office and Visual Studio the disk is running out of space. I need a small installation of Xamarin so I can view files (no need for compilation) inside Visual Studio. I’ve called it Visual Studio low profile.

The Xamarin installer uses an online manifest file. A google search found it here: InstallationManifest.xml. In there is the direct url to download the Xamarin For Visual Studio installer. That is what I needed.

After installing Xamarin for Visual Studio I can open solutions for both Android and iOS in Visual Studio. Just some messages you need to click away

or ignore. I am allowed readonly access and that is what I need.

The Programs and Features of Windows tells the footprint is 266Mb, the installer talks about a few Kb, the Xamarin folder in program files is around 5Mb and in Explorer the Properties of my Disk report a 1.5Gb size difference before and after the install. Not sure what the required space for the installation is, but it’s a lot less than the full install.