Xamarin Studio has been replaced for Visual Studio on MacOS. I have a project that builds a DLL using Xamarin iOS. For DevOps (automated release), I want to build the project for release from the command line. I know previously the mdtool was used for this purpose, as seen in this answer but now in visual studio there is no more mdtools binary anymore.
msbuild has replaced mdtool (and xbuild), so all the tasks that once were handled by mdtool are now handled by the cross-platform msbuild and its standard set of cmd-line options.
Release configuration:
Clean a single project in a solution
msbuild /p:SolutionDir=./ /target:Clean /p:Configuration=Release SomeProjectLibrary/SomeProjectLibrary.csproj
Build a single project in a solution
msbuild /p:SolutionDir=./ /target:Build /p:Configuration=Release SomeProjectLibrary/SomeProjectLibrary.csproj
Note: Using Using SolutionDir=./ so these cmds are being run from the root directory of the solution.
Related
I'm trying to build a job for Xamarin.forms project in mac terminal without UI method. but, not sure which are the tools are mandatory to be installed. Could anyone help here ?
Installed : Dotnet Core 6 version of visual studio SDK
Build need to be fully in terminal(mac-command line)
Need to do without visual studio application
Why not try build the app from the command line using MSBuild and see what errors it gives you. That way, you can find out what's missing and add things until it builds.
I'm using this command to build my apps from Windows (you may need to change a few things on Mac):
"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Professional\MSBuild\Current\Bin\amd64\msbuild.exe" C:\Projects\MyApp\src\MyApp\MyApp.iOS\MyApp.iOS.csproj /p:Platform=iPhone /p:BuildIpa=true /p:IpaPackageDir=C:\Projects\MyApp\artifacts\App_iOS /p:IpaPackageName=MyApp.ipa /p:ServerAddress=192.168.0.23 /p:ServerUser="Username" /p:ServerPassword=123456SafePassword /p:ContinueOnDisconnected=false /p:Configuration=Release /restore /target:Build /verbosity:Normal
Here's some useful info on Continuous Integration with Xamarin.
I am using windows self hosted agent with VS 2019 build tools installed. But in the build pipeline, I am unable to build ".vdproj" (.net framework 3.5) project. Please let me know whether installing of visual studio is the only option or any alternative approach available.
Thanks.
To build the .vdproj project, you will have to use devenv command to build the project.
Devenv.exe is the central Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Visual Studio.
So you need to install the Visual Studio to get the Devenv.exe to build the project.
In Azure DevOps, you can add the Command Line Task and run the following command to build the .vdproj project.
For example:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Enterprise\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe" MyProjectDir\MySolution.sln /Rebuild Release
Background
I recently converted my Xamarin.Forms app from PCL to Net Standard format.
All of my projects now use PackageReference in the csproj file. Which means no more package.config or package.json.
We use TFS 2015 to build, sign, package our .ipa and .apk files. After conversion, the default MSBUILD build steps do not work as they look for mdtool and the new Visual Studio has vstool instead. So, I updated the build steps to use new tools via command line.
All my projects are NetStandard now (including iOS and Android).
Issue
I can successfully restore NuGet packages using restore MySolution.sln -force on Mac build server. But when I run vstool build MySolution.sln after that, I get this error:
error: NuGet packages need to be restored before building. NuGet
MSBuild targets are missing and are needed for building. The NuGet
MSBuild targets are generated when the NuGet packages are restored.
I am able to successfully run the nuget restore and vstool build locally on the build machine. But only when TFS runs the command via agent, it shows that error message.
Setup
Builds: TFS 2015 on Mac agent running Visual Studio 7.5
According to the error and your description, you need also check if your build agent has corresponding capability to support vsbuild.
Take a look at this related question MacOS - Visual Studio Support and give a try with this workaround:
As a work around we set the Xamarin.iOS variable manually in the build
agent and changed the mdtool path in the Xamarin iOS Build step to
"/Applications/Visual Studio.app/Contents/MacOS/vstool".
Besides you could also try to use the suggestion from Matt in the comment above.
Ok. I was finally able to get a successful iOS build on Mac server. This is the setup that works,
Using PackageReference in iOS .csproj
No package.config, project.json, or AssemblyInfo.cs file.
Running nuget restore .sln before building the iOS project.
Build solution using <path-to-vstool>\vstool build .sln -c:<configuration>
Now, I am working on the Windows machine for Android setup. Once I have that working, I will post my findings here.
While I am building own Visual Studio Extension in TeamCity (same applies to any CI server build that supports building VS solutions), my build stucks on the step DeployVsixExtensionFiles. As far as I understand, the target is defined in VS Extensibility files and is being imported into any .csproj by default. I also realize that this is an "aka test" step that tries to embed an extension into a virtual copy of VS via running a command:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe /RootSuffix Exp /ResetSettings General.vssettings /Embedding /Command File.Exit
I have two questions:
1. Should I disable this step for Release build of Extension?
2. If yes, how can this be done.
The VS SDK installs the extension as a part of a build so you can F5 and run it. If you're CI system doesn't care about that, update your CI configuration to pass /p:DeployExtension=false to MSBuild.
I have setup a new server machine. I setup windows sdk, .net framework sdk, and checkout my visual studio from svn. I would like to build my application using msbuild but it keeps asking me where the "windowsx.h" file is. I do not want to setup any visual studio ide. How can I make msbuild see windows sdk include folder using console?
With a normal install of Visual Studio you get a shortcut to a Visual Studio prompt. This sets all environment variables so you can use the compiler (and other tools) from the command line. First you can try to run msbuild from such a prompt. If that works add the necessary folders to the msbuild settings.