Problems with my first Visual Studio iOS project

Question

I just tried to start a simple iOS project in Visual Studio, and it's saying that it cannot find a Mac Build Host. Most frustrating of all, the Xamarin site has no information at all on what a Mac Build Host is. I've popped up the command prompt in Windows and perfectly able to ping my Mac machine, so it's definitely viewable from Windows.

I'm guessing it's got to be some kind of a background process that needs to run on the Mac, but nowhere in the Xamarin site tells me where I can get it.

Help!

<vent>
P.S. I'm seriously having second thoughts about "cross platform" and "portability" and "reuse existing C# skills" jargon from Xamarin. It was way, way easier to get my first app started in simple Objective-C. Xamarin's approach feels like "we will ship you a broken product for $999, and you can help us figure out how to make this more marketable".
</vent>

Edit: After reading everyone's posts, I think I will just use the Xamarin Studio rather than take the Visual Studio approach. It seems like the less complicated approach in the long run for someone like me. Thanks to everyone for your post!

Answer 1

One further thing I've noticed is that despite my setting the Xamarin Bonjour service to start automatically, it somehow gets reset to Manual. The Xamarin plugin opens the services MMC when I launch Visual Studio and open an existing project when this occurs.

During debugging it's all too easy to stop the VS debugger before the iOS Simulator on the Mac machine has been halted. It works fine if you click on the iPhone Simulator bottom button then command-Q to close the simulator. That drops VS out of debug.

If though VS is stopped before the simulator in some cases this kills the connection and it needs VS to be closed down and restarted. Once or twice it has corrupted the iOS simulator and it comes up with an empty iPhone graphic, instead of the default Photos, Contacts Settings etc icons. In that case close and reopen it and as you start the simulator click on the iOS Simulator menu, then Reset Contents and Settings. That purges the corrupt state and it's all ok after that.

Overall it works well enough to not get in the way of development but any improvements by the Xamarin team are welcomed.

Answer 2

For anyone else who might have spent a few days going around in circles the answer above that states you need to close VS, open it and create a new iOS project holds the key.

Xamarin really needs to make this much clearer!

Andreas

Answer 3

The Xamarin docs site has instructions on how to set up your Mac to act as an iOS build host for Visual Studio. I agree this isn't very clear from the "Connect to a Xamarin.iOS Build Host" dialog, so I've filed a bug.

You can also use Xamarin Studio to develop Xamarin.iOS apps on the Mac. It uses the same project/solution format as Visual Studio, so you can share the solution with VS.

Answer 4

The Mac Build Host is a process which runs on the network-hosted mac you need to connect to from your Windows machine, in order to perform the final app compile and build. I have just installed iOS for Visual Studio, and I had to create a Xamarin account that was associated with the VS install. Also, I had to install Xamarin.iOS on the Mac itself, instructions here:

http://docs.xamarin.com/guides/ios/getting_started/installation/mac/

What wasn't explained properly was that I then had to close VS, open it and create a new iOS project. At this point, a wizard was initiated which used the Xamarin Bonjour service to locate our networked mac and use that as the build host. All the bits came installed with the Xamarin installer, I just had to initiate them by opening up a project.

Obviously this will be different for you using Xamarin Studio, but have you tried creating a new a project to see if this initiates a wizard? Or do you need to install the iOS on your mac as well as Windows?

Answer 5

Do you have bonjour installed on your windows machine? This is required for Xamarin studio on windows to talk to your mac build host. Also you need to set up the relationship as follows.

Section 3.1

Answer 6

I have to admit, I'm not entirely sure what is meant by "Mac Build Host" either. I would expect to find something like that if you were using Visual Studio to build with, not Xamarin Studio.

My best guess is that perhaps Xamarin Studio doesn't "see" your iOS development tools setup somehow? Can you go into the Add-in Manager and see what version of iOS development you have in there?

Sorry you're having a bad time with it so far. I've been using it for awhile and it's been fantastic for me so far.