#Ios Visual Studio Mac And Connect

Ios Visual Studio Mac And Connect

Pros: Remoted iOS Simulator for Windows runs in Visual Studio, which is available and easy to install.Not only you can test your Xamarin.iOS app without a Mac, you can now even change your code in real time. It allows developers to test and debug iOS apps in Visual Studio. Both iPhone and Android apps can be developed by using this emulator. To run the simulator, you need to open Mac and connect remotely with Windows PC.

NET development environment, the one that almost every C# developer calls homeвЂ”you were out of luck.I've got a Xamarin Forms solution with iOS and Android projects. If you wanted to use Visual StudioвЂ”the premier C# and. But one important detail has always been missing. NET, courtesy of MonoTouch. Visual Studio will compile your changes and quickly relaunch your app.Since 2009, it's been possible to develop iOS applications using C# and.

When the one-time king of corporate networking was taken over by The Attachmate Group, one of Attachmate's first moves was to lay off large portions of Novell's workforce. The realization of ambitionThe company Xamarin rose from the ashes of Novell. You can either use it as a build server, and actually do your development in Visual.I've been taking a look at it for the past few weeks to see how it all works. You can either use it as a build server, and actually do your development in Visual Studio (either in a standalone PC, or on a VM running on your Mac), or you can do your development directly on the Mac using Xamarin Studio as your IDE.The Mac is required for building as well as running the iOS simulator.

Xamarin 2.0 is the first full realization of that ambition.The first important thing about Xamarin 2.0 is that the awkward naming has been cleaned up. The company wants to marry highly productive tools and development environments to easy cross-platform development, while still allowing developers to tap into all the rich underlying capabilities each platform has to offer. They're producing a wide range of apps, with the major categories being internal use line-of-business apps and games.Xamarin's underlying goal has been to create the best mobile development experience. Today it boasts 12,000 paying customers and close to a quarter of a million developers now using the Mono stack. Attachmate, however, was only interested in two things: Novell's library of patents and the SUSE Linux business it bought in 2003.In spite of these rough edges, the company found an eager audience and grew rapidly.

For example, Xamarin.iOS gives Xamarin developers access to APIs such as Core Animation and iAd Xamarin.Android has things like an API for NFC hardware and another for accessing Google Maps.Also included in these platform-specific parts are all the user interface APIs. These platform-specific parts wrap the libraries and APIs of the underlying platform. NET Base Class Library, which provides standard functionality such as network connectivity, data structures, file and database access, and threading. Common ones include the C# language and the. There's also a Xamarin.Mac for producing apps for the Mac App Store.The platform is split into common parts and platform-specific parts. The iOS and Android variants are called Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android, respectively.

Xamarin has developed a library named Xamarin.Mobile that encompasses this functionality, to allow cross-platform apps to share more code. For example, all smartphone platforms have GPS APIs, camera APIs, and contact APIs. UI parts, however, should be platform-specific to ensure each UI looks and feels correct on its respective platform.There's also a large set of functionality that's common to smartphone platforms but not covered by the BCL.

Visual Studio's usual platform options are extended to include iOS devices, and it gains two special debug targets: the iOS Simulator and a physical iOS device.Although this is perhaps the most striking feature of Xamarin 2.0, it's also an odd one as there's not actually a whole lot to say about itвЂ”because, again, it just works. Get the software installed and you can create Xamarin.iOS projects in Visual Studio. The remarkable part about this is, well, it all just works. Xamarin says this was in huge demand, with three-quarters of customers wanting the ability to use Visual Studio for their iOS development.

AdvertisementBehind the scenes, things are a little more complicated. This is truly developing on Visual Studio. Prefer to use the ReSharper plugin for its richer refactoring and IntelliSense support? That will work just fine. Want to run unit tests with Nunit? Go right ahead. Visual Studio's key bindings, Visual Studio's text editor, Visual Studio's menus, Visual Studio's autocomplete and IntelliSenseвЂ”even Visual Studio's debuggerвЂ”are all provided and work in the usual Visual Studio manner.Want to use Visual Studio's integration with TFS or the new git integration? You can do that, because you have nearly the full range of Visual Studio features and capabilities available to you.

Sometimes I had to use the first entry, sometimes I had to use the second. If I had a Mac Mini tucked away in a cupboard, that would work too.The iOS build host is reached over the network. But the two don't have to use the same hardware. Visual Studio ran in a virtual machine inside VMware Fusion, with the iOS SDK and Xamarin build components installed on the OS X host. The programs are actually compiled using Apple's compiler and tools, so they are in every important sense identical to programs written in Objective-C.The setup I used had everything running on a single system. Visual Studio controls it remotely, using the Mac for all build-related tasks.

The network machinations and remote compilation were invisible. I hit ctrl-shift-B to build (or F5 to build, deploy, and debug) and everything happened as expected. When it worked, it was essentially invisible.

It offers almost all the functionality that Visual Studio developers have grown to expect, with the same user interface they know and love.There is one gap. You can change values while the program is paused. You can then inspect values by using Visual Studio's various debugger panes or hovering the mouse over variables in the text editor. Set a breakpoint and hit F5 and your app will build, deploy, start executing, and run until it hits the breakpoint.

It feels wrong to have a virtual iPad up on screen next to Visual Studio. Visual Studio on the left, debugging the iPad.The result is, well, a little uncanny. As a result, you'll probably want to make use of VMware's Unity mode (or similar features in other virtualization software) so that both Visual Studio and its debugger and the iOS Simulator can be visible on-screen at the same time.Enlarge / iOS Simulator on the right, pretending to be an iPad. It runs only on the OS X desktop. Unfortunately, the iOS Simulator isn't made available remotely. Given the nature of the compilation and deployment system that's at work behind the scenes, this perhaps isn't altogether surprising.Deployment for debugging and testing can be on physical hardware or the iOS Simulator that's part of the iOS SDK.

Xamarin says it intends to provide an iOS experience comparable to the Android one in the longer term.Although it's difficult to imagine the OS X dependency ever going away due to the nature of the iOS SDK and the desire to keep Apple on-side and happy, an integrated forms designer within Visual Studio is a likely future development. Using Xamarin.Android with Visual Studio also doesn't require a counterpart system for building and deploying, as the Android SDK runs directly under Windows. Xamarin.Android already has: there's a form designer that produces Android's user interface XML to allow drag-and-drop user interface building. Xamarin says MonoTouch developers are currently split about 50/50 between those who use Interface Builder and those who build their interfaces entirely in code.Longer term, Xamarin hopes to fill this gap. Instead, developers wanting a graphical interface editor must use Interface Builder in Xcode. At the moment, Xamarin.iOS for Visual Studio includes no user interface editor.

Ios Simulator For Mac Visual Studio