[Enhancement] x:DataType should provide intellisense features

[haavamoa]

Summary

When developing an Xamarin.Forms application, we often tend to set the binding context by injection or some kind of service that handles orchestration of views - viewmodels. One of the challanges when working with the XAML is making sure bindings are correct and not getting help from the IDE when you go to definition on the properties in the IDE.

One helpful way is using x:DataType. It helps you with compiling the binding and it will give an error when something is wrong.
When using this in a Datatemplate, you do get intellisense. When using it on a page or a contentview, there is no intellisense. There is no help from the IDE when you go to definition of the bindings, you end up in object, not to the class that holds the properties.

A workaround for me is to use the old WPF trick of using dblend:DataContext. This helps intellisense, but it feels unesseary when x:Datatype could provide the same behavior. Go to definition would also be extremely helpful, as you often want to inspect the binding target directly from the binding in the XAML.

When starting off MAUI we can make sure that this is in place from the start, so I wanted to create the feature request issue here to highlight it.

This is most likely a visual studio feature support, but I want to flag it here as well. 👍

here is a Xamarin.Forms issue that highlight the same feature request.