Xamarin Visual Studio IOS Development Without a Mac?

Question

I'm a .NET developer and want to write an IOS & Android app in C#. I've had a read around Xamarin for Visual Studio which looks interesting if not a tad expensive!

Do you need a Mac to debug your code? Do you just need a networked Mac to actually deploy the app to the Store?

Is the best option just to buy a Mac and run Windows with VS in a VM or can I just use my windows machine, write & debug the code in Windows then just hook up to a networked Mac for final deployment?

Answer 1

From May 2017, you can develop app without MAC.

Microsoft Xamarin introduce a Live Player. With Live Player, iOS apps can be deployed directly onto an iPhone or other iDevice from a PC running Visual Studio, where the code can then be tested and debugged.

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WARNING The Xamarin Live Player Preview has ended. But it changed Hot Reload. With this feature, you can develop iOS app with your iPhone See discussion

See this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awgZDL1a3YI

this is Live Player Get start section: Live Player

Note: The final build and submission to the App Store will still require a Mac

Device Requirements

The Xamarin Live Player app supports the following devices:

iOS

• iOS 9.0 or later.
• ARM64 processor.
• Check the App Store for a list of supported devices.

Android

• Android 4.2 or later.
• ARM-v7a, ARM-v8a, ARM64-v8a, x86, or x86_64 processor.

Limitations

There are some limitations on the things Xamarin Live Player can run, including the items below:

• Android user interfaces designed with AXML files are not currently supported.
• Some iOS storyboard features are not supported.
• iOS XIB files are not supported.
• Custom Renderers are not supported.
• Xamarin.Forms Effects are not supported.
• Embedded resources are not supported (ie. embedding images or other resources in a PCL).
• Limited support for reflection (currently affects some popular NuGets, like SQLite and Json.NET). Other NuGets are still supported.
• Some system classes cannot be overridden (for example, you cannot implement a subclass).
• Some platform features that require provisioning can't work in the Xamarin Live Player app (however it has been configured for common operations like camera access).
• Custom targets and build steps are ignored. For example, tools like Fody cannot be incorporated.

Answer 2

Yes, you must have a Mac to do Xamarin.iOS development. The Mac is required for building as well as running the iOS simulator. 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.