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Setup Xamarin on MacOS

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Hardik Mistry edited this page Sep 1, 2017 · 4 revisions

Do not own a MacOS PC or Laptop!

Most of you might not have a MacOS PC or Laptop and the initial investment may not sound right to you, in that case we suggest you to explore http://www.macincloud.com/, a Mac as a hosted service provider (Physical Machine instance over RDP) without you having to bear upfront cost to own a MacOS PC or Laptop.

Disclaimer: This is not a paid endorsment, we shared from our personal experience where many of us want to be able to ship iOS apps but may not want to simply purchase a MacOS PC or Laptop, instead we can opt for a Machine as a Service model and save our initial investment. (Note: Running MacOS on a Virutal Machine using Oracle VirtualBox, VMWare is illegal however since you are opting to a use a Physical Machine via RDP hosted by MacInCloud is completely legal)

Before you begin

For better experience, we recommend you to follow the official installation guide here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/mac/installation

  • Ensure you are connected to internet as most of the packages, SDKs will get downloaded over the internet during installation.

  • Ensure you have sufficient RAM available (if you plan to use emulator which can range from 512 Mb to 2048 Mb in size), we recommend at-least 8 Gb RAM but 4 Gb RAM should work fine.

  • You'll need to sign in using your Microsoft email id (you@outlook.com or you@hotmail.com etc, optionally you may use your organisation account which is configured as Office365 account), sign up for a free Microsoft email here: https://outlook.live.com/owa/

  • You'll need to sign up for Xamarin account as well to continue using Xamarin services, create your's for free here: https://www.xamarin.com/account/register

  • sudo permissions (Administrative previlage) to be able to install.

  • MacOS with latest updates (we suggest you to upgrade to latest version, however that is not mandatory).

  • XCode with latest updates (we suggest you to upgrade to latest version, however that is not mandatory unless you are using XCode 8.x) (XCode can be downloaded either via Apple developer portal or via the AppStore app on your Mac), if you have XCode already installed, we recommend to update to latest version, however for variety of reasons, you may not want to update your XCode, in that case try to build the solution, if you encounter errors while trying to build the solution, you may need to update your XCode to continue.

  • Visual Studio for Mac with latest updates (Download your free copy here)

Xamarin SDK (Xamarin SDK, Xamarin.Android SDK and Xamarin.iOS SDK) Android SDK, Java SDK will be installed as required by Visual Studio for Mac installer. In some cases you are already having Android SDK installed, we suggest you to let the installer install a separate copy to ensure the options do not mismatch with your existing Android enviornment

Note when installing Visual Studio for Mac

When installing Visual Studio for Mac, leave the options to default, the installer will check/install for missing dependencies and/or SDKs for Xamarin along with Visual Studio.

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