In the early days of Xamarin.Forms, if you wanted to start customizing any of the built-in controls in ways beyond what were explicitly exposed on those controls, you probably found yourself creating a lot of custom renderers. Renderers can be a great way to hook into the Xamarin.Forms rendering pipeline and inject your own customizations, but it can quickly get unwieldy if you do it a lot, and is often a larger hammer than you would want to be swinging.

In more recent versions of Xamarin.Forms, the concepts of behaviors and effects were introduced that make these types of customizations much more approachable. In contrast to renderers, where you can only have a single implementation for any given control, behaviors and effects allow you to define customizations at a much more granular level. In addition, you can add any number of behaviors and effects to a control, meaning you can compose them together to get the outcome for which you're looking.

Read the rest of the article over at Visual Studio Magazine.