SEATTLE—With the Xamarin tooling built in to Visual Studio, iOS and
Android developers can already use a PC for a big part of their dev
process by using the Visual Studio IDE for writing their code. For iOS
development, however, there has always been an extra complication: the
actual software building and deployment had to take place on a Mac.
Visual Studio remotely controls the Apple machine to do this work, so
although developers can stay inside the Visual Studio environment they
know and love, they still need a Mac on their local network.
Xamarin Live Player, announced today, takes the Mac out of the
develop/deploy/debug cycle. 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. This means that
the Mac is no longer needed for that core development cycle.
The final build and submission to the App Store will still require a
Mac, so you can't go without an Apple system entirely, but what this
means is that if you want to develop, as many of us do, on a laptop and
aren't on the same network as your Mac, you can.
Live Player also supports Android, though this is obviously less of a
big deal since direct development and deployment from a PC is already
standard for Android.
Microsoft believes its Live Player system is entirely compatible with
Apple's rules and regulations for App Store apps. Behind the scenes,
the Live Player includes an interpreter for .NET code. This means that
running an app through Live Player is slower than it would be if
natively built on a Mac, but that's not such a big deal for many aspects
of user interface development.
For those of us who are Mac users anyway, yesterday saw the release of Visual Studio for Mac.
Visual Studio for Mac is a different codebase from Visual Studio on
Windows, but the two products share things like the compiler and build
infrastructure, enabling projects to be shared and co-developed between
Mac and PC with no conversion or other hurdles to contend with.
Microsoft is also working to better align the various versions of
.NET and the XAML user interface development language across its
platforms. Later this year, the UWP version of .NET will be updated to
support .NET Standard 2.0. Microsoft is also unifying the XAML used for
cross-platform Xamarin Forms with that used for UWP. The new XAML, XAML
Standard, will allow XAML to be shared (and copy/pasted, the best kind
of code reuse) between UWP and Xamarin Forms apps.
Finally, Microsoft is continuing to embrace Linux developers and
toolchains on Windows. The current Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)
comes out of the box with support for Ubuntu; later this year, Microsoft
is adding official support for a SUSE userland and a Fedora userland.
It'll even be possible to install all three side by side, giving your
Windows machine three different Linux personalities simultaneously. The
installation of WSL is also simpler, with the three Linux environments
all being installed from the Windows Store.
Source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/xamarin-live-player-almost-takes-the-mac-out-of-ios-development/
