I have a beginner question regarding Xamarin Studio. I wrote a prototype app in Windows Form using Visual Studio and I now want to flesh it out and deploy to both Windows desktop and OSX. Someone suggested using Xamarin Studio but I have run into an issue. When I try to build on a Mac for OSX all I get is a .exe. I am new to OSX development and am having trouble figuring out how to continue. Is there a build configuration I am missing? There doesn't seem to be any options for build targets.
Thank you for your time
the .exe can be run with Mono, but what you may be looking for is in the "Build" menu (at least, in the latest Beta), then "Archive for publishing" then "Sign and Distribute"
Related
Visual Studio is the recommended tool (superseding Xamarin Studio) on both Windows and Mac. However, the VSTS page Build your Xamarin app says to use "Xamarin". Presumably that means Xamarin Studio, even though the the "Install Xamarin" link on the page points to Visual Studio. That ambiguity and the March 6 date on the page indicate that it was overlooked during the rollout of Visual Studio 7 for Mac, leaving us to wonder what is the right approach for setting up an agent.
What is the best way to create an iOS build agent these days? Do you install Visual Studio for Mac or Xamarin Studio?
Sounds like a bit of confusion here in the terminology. The IDE is now Visual Studio for Mac, but the underlying framework is still Xamarin. That is to say, Xamarin.iOS/Xamarin.Android/Xamarin Forms are "integrated" into Visual Studio for Mac; they are the tools that will compile and package your mobile app. This is what the VSTS build task page is saying when it asks you to "Install Xamarin".
As for setting up a VSTS build agent, here's a checklist that will hopefully get you going:
Download and install Visual Studio for Mac on a computer running OS X/macOS. Confirm that Visual Studio for Mac can indeed build and sign the IPA's.
If necessary, install all the certificates and provisioning profiles, and confirm that the IPA is correctly signed.
Create a build project in VSTS.
Install the VSTS build agent for OS X/macOS and connect/register the build agent to the VSTS project. Please be aware that the Xamarin license task/utility is deprecated and no longer needed. If that does appear as a step in your VSTS build project, delete it.
Go back to VSTS, and configure the VSTS project to build the Xamarin.iOS project via the OSX/macOS build agent. Once the build agent is connected to the VSTS project.
I'll admit, there is a lot of moving parts and things to do here. I hope this high level overview is enough to point you in the right direction.
Per starain's advice, I tried installing VS for Mac. It started up, but failed with an 'Unable to parse condition "!(Exists($(SharedVersionOutputDirectory)))"' error. I've encountered several bugs in the Xamarin tool chain, so this may have nothing to do with VS vs. XS, but just be part of the current duct-tape-and-bailing-twine experience. OTOH, there's still a top-level Xamarin page saying VS Mac is still preview, so who knows how baked it really is?
So even though the Mac build agent does find and run the VS Mac build tooling, I gave up and used my Windows build agent instead, and had MSBuild on Windows connect to the Mac for the iOS build.
I have a Xamarin Mac app I've been handed to make some changes. I've got everything working correctly as far as Windows Visual Studio Xamarin connecting to Mac Xamarin -- the Mac ssh agent works and whatnot.
However, how do I compile the app? When I build it on Windows, it generates an .exe file. Is something supposed to be generated on the Mac side, too? Or do I take that .exe file and somehow package it into an OSX app?
I was trying to stay in my Windows environment to do the coding and building as much as possible.
Thank you.
You will need to compile/package/debug it on macOS.
The build process is performed locally on Windows, generating IL assemblies that cannot be used for running or debugging apps, and it doesn't create application bundles.
re: https://developer.xamarin.com/releases/vs/xamarin.vs_4/xamarin.vs_4.2/#Xamarin.Mac_minimum_support.
macOS Apps
Mac apps can be opened and compiled in Visual Studio to check for errors, however to debug or create a working executable the project must currently be built on a Mac. This limited support for Mac projects allows for easier code sharing in Visual Studio between iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac apps.
re: https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/cross-platform/windows/visual-studio/#macOS_Apps
Thanks in advance!
I am a cocos2d-x Developer, till now I developed games only for iOS and android using cocos2d-x, now I also want to develop game for Windows Phone using cocos2d-x, but I have no idea, how to do that, So please give me some idea:
Which IDE we used for it?
How to create cocos2d-x project for windows device?
How we run it on windows device?
I am working on mac. Is it necessary to work on windows computer for developing games for windows device?
I am using cocos2d-x v3.4 now.
Use Visual Studio 2012 or later.
Use the cocos script tool. It creates a project for all the platforms:
cocos new SuperGame -p com.me.supergame -l cpp -d somePath
See the MSDN docs for deploying on windows phone
Probably not the answer you want to hear but I use a vm with windows installed on my mac.
If you want to get started with the Cocos Tests on windows.
Download Cocos2d-x 3.x
Navigate to the cocos2d-x-3.x/build folder
Open cocos2d-win32.vc2012.sln
Right click "CppTest" or "TestCpp" (or something similar) in the solution explorer and select "Set as Startup project."
Build and run the project. (The build will take a long time)
I tried installing monogame and monodevelop but after downloading and installing the required applications there is no Monogame IDE in my application folder.
What i did was the following:
Started on the monogame download page (http://www.monogame.net/downloads) and followed the corresponding links to download these files for OSX:
Xamarin Studio 4.0.12 installer
Mono + GTK# to which it linked me to the mono download page to which i download
The Runtime and SDK files for OSX Version 2.10.x
I installed each program in the corresponding order and continues the installation process by downloading the MonoGame installation V3.0.1 for Xamarin and MonoDevelop because i wasnt sure which one to get. But when I couldn't simply drag or click to install I looked in my application folder there was no Monogame IDE only the Xamarin Studio IDE which I presume is the correct process. But When I opened the Xamarin IDE it says that I've download the starter version and I cannot use Monogame.
Aside from the monogame website and various googling instructions, I've tried following these very clear instruction from this blog (http://mastrgamr.net/xna/programming-xna-on-mac/) but got stuck when I could find nor open my MonoGame and the Xamarian IDE displaying the correct screen.
I do not understand what I am doing wrong as the installation instructions seem very clear.
EDIT:
So i found out that Xamarian IDE replaced the MonoDeveloper IDE though the instructions I've found are using MonoDeveloper IDE as the example. I'm not sure if theres a significant difference but I presume there is a difference as I still can't seem to run monoGame and the outdated instructions aren't syncretic with my actions. Can anyone provide me with updated Xamarian instructions?
A little while ago Xamarin replaced MonoDevelop with Xamarin Studio. So MonoDevelop is now called Xamarin Studio and it looks and behaves a little different. That's why any tutorials talking about MonoDevelop are going to be a little confusing.
I've never tried to install Xamarin Studio on a Mac so I'm not sure what the error is about the starter version. However, I suspect it might be talking about the Xamarin licensing.
What I can tell you is, you won't be able to develop games with MonoGame on the starter edition if you are targeting platforms other than Windows (this includes Android, iOS and I presume Mac) due to the limited app size. You should consider buying a license from Xamarin if this is indeed your issue.
I would like to know if it is possible to compile a Monotouch project that does not have any reference to any UI library in Visual Studio. This project only use the Monotouch framework.
I have done some research and I read that, if the project don't have any reference to the Apple SDK , I should be able to build a MonoTouch project using Visual Studio. If I can, do i need some particular configuration to achive my goal.
Some related links:
How easy is it to develop an iPhone application using MonoTouch in Visual Studio?,
How can I develop for iPhone using a Windows development machine?,
iPhone development on Windows
Even if your project doesn't have any references to MonoTouch libraries, it is still a MonoTouch library project. Visual studio doesn't recognize that project type and because of that you can't really compile the code.
I wrote about this a while ago, and how you can change your project so you can actually use Visual Studio for development (although you won't be able to run the app) here:
http://escoz.com/blog/developing-with-monotouch-on-windows-and-visual-studio
Hope that helps.
There is a Visual Studio addin that may help. It hasn't been updated in a while though. Also, this would only help you write the code. To compile and run the code, you will still need MonoTouch and a Mac. https://github.com/follesoe/VSMonoTouch
Update : As of February, 2013 Xamarin includes Visual Studio support for developing iOS apps in their Business sku of Xamarin.iOS. You can fully develop on Windows + Visual Studio, but still need a Mac on your network to perform builds and run the simulator.
If you're talking about building a DLL or library in VS.NET that you could then use in a MonoTouch project, I believe the answer is NO. To be usable in MT, the code has to be compiled with MT.
The MonoDevAssist VS extension (search VS Extension Manager for "monotouch") seems to work perfectly. There are just a couple of easy steps to follow post-installation, which are documented here:
http://monodevassist.codeplex.com/documentation