Cross-platform iOS and Android using Visual Studio 2013 - android

I'm building an app for android and iOS. I have decided to use Xamarin to do this, however my macbook is too slow to run Xamarin Studio efficiently and is having trouble with the iPhone/Android emulators. So I am using my Windows PC with Core i7 and 8gb ram.
I installed Xamarin Studio and noticed there is no option for iOS development.
It seems the only option is to get Visual Studio 2013 and use the "Shared project reference manager" extension instead of the old "Project Linker" extension.
I can't seem to find any tutorials online showing how to set this up and how to create cross-platform apps using this.
Would anyone be able to provide me with a quick explanation on how to set this up so I can do cross-platform development (Android & iOS) on Visual Studio 2013?
Are there any links to tutorials on how to actually create the cross-platform apps this way? I can only find tutorials on Xamarin Studio and the "Project Linker" extension, not the "Shared project reference manager".
Would I be better off getting an older version of Visual Studio and using "Project Linker"?

In most cases there is no significant difference switching from Xamarin Studio to Visual Studio, but Xamarin does maintain some articles specific to VS,
http://developer.xamarin.com/guides/cross-platform/windows/visual-studio/

In order to do iOS development from Visual Studio, you NEED a Mac to act as your build host. Your build host can be a different physical Mac, or alternatively (which works much better in my opinion), use a physical Mac that runs a Windows VM for Visual Studio. Either way, a Mac is required.
http://developer.xamarin.com/guides/ios/getting_started/installation/windows/introduction_to_xamarin_ios_for_visual_studio/

Related

Can I debug an Android Xamarin Forms app on a Windows 7 PC?

I have a Windows 7 PC and a Windows 10 PC. I have installed Visual Studio 2017 and specifically Mobile Development with .NET (all components) on both.
I am able to develop an Xamarin Forms app on the Windows 10 PC, which supports Android; IOS and UWP.
I have attempted to create an Xamarin app for Android on the Windows 7 PC. When I attempt to launch any emulator on the windows 7 PC; I see this message:
I have Googled this and I have tried:
1) Changing the platform of the app from AnyCPU to x86.
2) Reinstalling Visual Studio 2017
One post I found earlier advised me to use the Google Emulators instead of the Windows emulators.
1) Am I using the Google emulators in my screenshot above (notice that the emulators say: "Google APIs")?
Or
2) Do I have to install Android Studio (https://developer.android.com/studio) and do native Android development in order to use the Google emulators?
I'm fairly certain you cannot run an official emulator on Windows 7.
The Windows system requirements for Android Studio says:
The Android Emulator only supports 64-bit Windows
However, it seems likely that Genymotion will work - worth downloading and testing.
As a general caution, I've found the Android toolchain for deploying Xamarin Forms to be the most fragile part of Forms development. It's quite possible you can go to a lot of effort to set this up to still run into weird, impossible-to-diagnose errors with Visual Studio.
Update
As you have 64 bit Windows 7, it's worth trying.
General advice try using plain Android Studio and building a trivial app from a template within it. This applies to testing any environment, be it virtual or with attached devices. If this doesn't work, the added layers of Xamarin Forms are unlikely to.
Oh, and seriously, don't just test things on the simulators. You really need to test on hardware.

Xamarin questions

I have a few questions and I'm hoping some people could explain it a bit more.
Recently Xamarin has been released to the public for free and you're able to download/install it for free.
Let me say first that I have Windows 7 and Visual Studio 2015 installed on my computer.
I have succesfully installed Xamarin and the Java/Androids SDKs and got it running.
But now I have the following 'problems':
When opening a new Xamarin Forms project I get the following message:
"A problem was encountered creating the sub project 'Projectname.Windows'. This project requires a Visual Studio update to load. Right-click on the project and choose "Download Update"."
Is this because of my OS?
When opening the new project, the 'ProjectName.UWP (Universal Windows)' subproject always give errormessages on everthing.
Reason?
If I want to run the .IOS subproject, is the only way by connection a IOS device? Is there no emulator for example an Iphone?
Thank you.
It's possible that you don't have the SDK / tooling installed for Windows Phone, so you will have to download the update as described in the error message - this should resolve the problem.
What error messages are you receiving?
You need to connect to a Mac over the network which will allow you to build and debug your apps. You can deploy apps to the iOS Simulator on your Mac, or to an iOS device connected to your Mac, from Visual Studio. For more information on using Xamarin.iOS with Visual Studio, I would suggest the following guide: Introduction to Xamarin.iOS for Visual Studio
Regarding your questions.
1. You should check you updates of the Visual Studio. There are a possibilities that the supporting packages can't locate. The error says that you need to download the updates. Nah, it's not about your OS. If you are done installing the visual studio, then your IDE is working properly. The problem persist is whenever you are lack of updates and packages in the give project.
2. The error could be your pc has no windows emulator to support the UWP to run properly. If you have one, uninstall it and install again.
3. You can use emulator, iOS Emulator but you still need a mac. There's a agreement between microsoft and mac regarding this thing. So far, until now, you can't run iOS simulator in Windows without Mac devices with XCODE
I hope it makes sense.
Answers to your Questions
1. it may be a visual studio update issue, try with latest.
2. i think UWP projects are not supporting with windows 7 OS(correct me if i am wrong), and also try with shared project structure,because portable has some problems with windows 7.
3. Yes currently there is no iOS emulator for Visual studio, if you want to run your app on ios simulator you have to connect your visual studio to Mac machine and then you can run.
Hope this will help
Answering your questions:
1- you might need to upgrade to windows 10. I have solved many issues when I upgraded to Windows 10. VS 2017 works very well with win10.
2- I would definitely recommend downloading the Visual Studio emulator which is a dedicated standalone application that has many emulators. It's much faster and reliable than android emulator. Also it has iPhone and windows emulator too.
3- in order to be able to use iPhone emulator, you must either do:
A) have a Mac device in the network to be able to connect VS with it. And it must have xcode installed on it.
B) you can also do a vmware virtual machine on any windows device and install on it xcode.
For detailed explanation on how tondo the above you can find them on YouTube.
Hope you have more luck.

Mobile application development in .Net?

I am new in developing Mobile application.
Can anyone please gimme some info regarding how to develop a mobile application ( Android, iOS, Windows) using Visual studio?
If so, in which Edition of visual studio is that possible to develop a cross platform ( Android, iOS, Windows) .
I am using Visual studio 2013 Express Edition. I have tried using Xamarin , but I want using Visual studio.
Please share some info .
Thanks in Advance.
Have you tried using the Xamarin add-on for Visual Studio? You don't have to use the Xamarin SDK, there is an extension that you can add to Visual Studio here --> http://xamarin.com/visual-studio and I'm sure it will work with Visual Studio 2013 Express Edition.
You can have a look at these alternatives http://alternativeto.net/software/xamarin-studio/
For windows phone you can use Mobile development SDK. After downloading Mobile development SDK you have to install it. After installation you can create mobile application(windows) using visual studio.
Its not possible to develop so easily for all different platforms just in Visual Studio, you will need to look at some Cross platform alternatives:
PhoneGap
Titanium
Xamarin
Its not a quick fix solution I am afraid, you are better off learning one native framework at a time.
If you are using Visual studio 2013 Express Edition then you can not extend it, so you will not able to use xamarin plugin.you need to use Xamarin Studio for this.If you are able to get Visual studio Business Edition then you can get this done simply adding plugin.
Also check this studio
Visual studio plugins are NOT available for any express edition.
You compulsorily need a non-express edition of Visual Studio for installing the xamarin plug in.
In order to get the plug in you need to get the $999 per year per developer business plan.
mentioned here. https://store.xamarin.com/ .
For windows phone 8 anyways you use VS.
for android you get this plug in from xamarin. Even for IOs you get theplug in but, you need a mac for debugging running apps on the ios simulator which is not yet seen on windows. So you need pairing your PC with a Mac for ios.
Cheers.

how to run eclipse android emulator via visual studio

Hi is it possible to run or communicate eclipse android emulator via MS visual studio?
If yes please help me or state ways how to set up possible solution.
If you are using Mono for Andriod.
We can run the app as usual in Visual Studio by choosing
Debug > Start Without Debugging (or Start Debugging to run with the debugger attached).
or Simply press F5 in your “Mono for Android” Visual Studio project.
Visual Studio will launch the Select Device dialog Selecting Start emulator image in this dialog and it will open a list of available emulators:
When we choose the emulator we want to run and then click OK, Mono for Android launches the emulator. After it starts up, the emulator will appear in the Running devices list
From the Android documentation:
The recommended way to develop an Android application is to use Eclipse with the ADT plugin...
Added new Solution based on the comments
vs-android is intended to provide a collection of scripts and utilities to support integrated development of Android NDK C/C++ software under Microsoft Visual Studio.
Currently vs-android only works under Visual Studio 2010. Earlier versions lack the MSBuild integration with the C/C++ compilation systems.
The only required component is the Android NDK. Neither Cygwin, Java, nor the full Android SDK are needed to compile and link C/C++ code.

Setting up Android SDK with Netbeans or Visual Studio?

I'd like to set up Android SDK with Netbeans or Visual Studio 2010. I am coming back to Windows programming after 3 months on Apple iMac (for iPhone programming).
Would somebody be able to explain how to set up the NetBeans environment so I can compile and test Android Apps directly form NetBeans.
I will be testing on a simulator, not a real device. My platform is Windows 7 Ultimate.
Thanks.
EDIT:
nbandroid is proving annoying to set up. It requires platforms. How do I install those?
It seems I can't use Eclipse even if I wanted to. It can't find the Java VM DLL... Help with that is appreciated.
You need to install the Android SDK and a NetBeans plugin called nbandroid. There are lots of instructions here.
I do recommend however using Eclipse because the plugin that you use on that is officially supported by Google, the Netbeans one is community developed I think, and a lot of the tools may be missing (like Allocation Tracker or Emulator controls. I don't know if they are in the netbeans plugin because I haven't used it but I'm guessing you wont have the full range of SDK tools available in the plugin).
Doesn't sound like nbAndroid is your problem. No matter how you develop you need to select the Android target platforms with the AVD Manager from the Android SDK.
You should download the 'ADT' plugin it allows to kickstart android development directly by using the eclipse exe in the zip file

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