Xamarin Forms Real Time Designer / Previewer

I have been trying what is available out there, at the moment, with regards to a real time UI designer for Xamarin forms.

The outcome of my research is:

1.  Tried Xamarin's Previewer - am stuck with the designer showing a gray box containing  "XFPageRendererView". You can find other users facing the same issue. I tried to follow what they did to overcome it, but without success. Actually none of the solutions presented is really clear. It's worth mentioning a major drawback of this option: you must have a Mac running (at least in the current state of things, this seems to be a bug, not yet fixed) , to which you will connect to as the Mac Agent in Visual Studio, otherwise the previewer does not seem to respond. Like Gorilla Player, requires you to code your UI using XAML.
2. Xamarin Forms Player - there is a nuget package, it is a headache to install, because it will (may) conflict with several of your other nuget packages - my workaround here was to manually install all the depencencies/missing ones, one by one, in the Droid project. Still, after being all set and ready to go, I could not go passed the Window with the Connect button. No idea how to proceed from there, what am I supposed to do, how do I finally see the preview. No suceess, followed the docs/the site, to no avail.
3. Last and only working option - Gorilla Player. Setup consists of installing a program both in the desktop and in the device. But that's all. Just follow the instructions from the site, and things move smoothly. Drawback: you are forced to code your UI using XAML.

Silverlight NumericUpDown and BusyIndicator dlls missing

If you are facing the messages

The type or namespace name 'NumericUpDown' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)

or

The type or namespace name 'BusyIndicator' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)

You are likely missing the installation of Silverlight's toolkit. Install the one that matches the silverlight version you are using.

Find out which mySql version you are using without using the command line

Most posts will tell you to run something in the mysql command line, but in case you do not have it installed, like me (I have only an sql editor installed), function VERSION can give you that from the Sql Editor you are using:

Simply run  a SELECT VERSION()