Building a Mac .app file in Windows using Mono

Question

We have a team that built an agent in Mono using MonoDevelop on Mac and we want to build it with the rest of our native and C# source code in Windows but I cannot seem to get either msbuild or mono to build the .app file on Windows. I get an error that the proect type is not supported. The other projects that were created in Mono build just fine, it is only the .app that is giving us trouble.

Has anyone had an success building Mac/Mono .app files in Windows? Or is there a good alternative to a .app file for running a service type application on Mac?

Answer 1

Despite having MonoDevelop on both Windows and OSX you will not be able to build the .app in Windows - Windows doesn't have any of the required libraries (you need to have XCode installed for MonoDevelop to compile your application in OSX)

You can compile any DLL's that aren't UI related in Windows, then link them up to the app in OSX, but there's probably not really any benefit to that unless you need to do unit tests from Windows or something. The Mono project is focused on moving .NET development to OSX, rather than the other way around.