I am a long-standing Visual Studio developer. All my experience is under Windows. I currently run VS 2017 15.7.4 (which I believe is the latest released version). I started exploring Xamarin.iOS under VS2017 recently, to see if it is a reasonable alternative to building an iPhone app. I use a Mac Mini as a build server, and could build my app natively with XCode, but that would require learning XCode and Swift.
My question is this: how steep is the learning curve to getting Xamarin under VS configured so that it reliably builds and deploys an iPhone app for testing? And what are the configuration requirements for doing so?
Those probably sound like weird questions. But I'm asking them because my experience with Xamarin iOS under VS2017 has been truly bizarre. The scope and variety of weird problems I'm running into make me wonder if I've missed some basic element of configuration or setup.
Here are some examples of what I've run into:
- app icons displaying properly on the iPhone...and then suddenly vanishing (I've spent hours trying to figure out how to get them back).
- build error messages about missing image files in the AppIcons catalog, which I solved by manually editing the csproj file to eliminate references to image files (e.g., IconXXX.png) that I never referenced in the project and which do not display when you view the AppIcons catalog under VS.
- error messages during debug deployment about a missing Agent and/or connection to the Mac build server, even though Pair to Mac shows a live and valid connection
- attempting to run the app under the simulator results in the simulator opening...and then displaying a spinning "please wait" icon for at least 5 minutes (I gave up after that); closing the simulator window, stopping debugging, and restarting debugging causes the simulator process to stall at "Checking server..."
- saved resources (e.g., Assets.xcassets) which suddenly become unsaved (i.e., marked by an * in the file name display) without any change having been made to them (typically immediately after triggering a manual save of the resource)
Things got sufficiently weird that I finally did a complete repair/reinstall of Visual Studio, figuring there might be a corrupt file lurking around. But that didn't change or improve things.
In short, it seems like I am spending more time fighting with Xamarin and/or Visual Studio than I am writing software. Which brings me back to "what am I missing/doing wrong?" and "how effective a development environment is Xamarin.iOS under VS?"
I look forward to hearing from everyone.
- Mark