Don't have mac machine (or my own remote access), How can I debug my Xamarin App for iOS on Windows 10

Abdul Samad Patel 46 Reputation points
2021-03-18T06:19:08.837+00:00

Hi, I have my Android App developed in Xamarin with Visual Studio 2019 Community. The application working fine and become robust, now we need to provide an iOS build for that application, we do not have our own mac machine. Thanks

Xamarin
Xamarin
A Microsoft open-source app platform for building Android and iOS apps with .NET and C#.
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Visual Studio Debugging
Visual Studio Debugging
Visual Studio: A family of Microsoft suites of integrated development tools for building applications for Windows, the web and mobile devices.Debugging: The act or process of detecting, locating, and correcting logical or syntactical errors in a program or malfunctions in hardware. In hardware contexts, the term troubleshoot is the term more frequently used, especially if the problem is major.
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  1. Cole Xia (Shanghai Wicresoft Co,.Ltd.) 6,751 Reputation points
    2021-03-18T07:56:49.147+00:00

    Hello,

    Welcome to Microsoft Q&A!

    We can use Hot Restart to debug iOS application without mac , notice that there are some limitations with it , and we will still need a Mac machine to do a full compilation, signing, and deployment for your application to production.

    However , recently it seems something wrong with Hot Restart , the app crash at opening , the fix will be released in next visual studio version ,check this issue : https://github.com/xamarin/Xamarin.Forms/issues/13759 .


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  2. Daniel Price 1 Reputation point
    2022-02-11T17:01:52.16+00:00

    Unfortunately the issue is that Apple will only let you use XCode to compile an iOS application - even VS for Mac uses XCode to do the actual compilation.

    What you can do however is to do all your development on a Windows PC and tell VS to compile it on any Mac you can connect to with Remote Desktop. At my organisation (a strictly Windows shop) we use a service called MacInCloud to rent Remote Desktop access to a Mac in a datacentre somewhere on a pay-as-you-go basis to compile and test our iOS app. It's probably not as responsive as testing locally on a physical device, but it got us out of a jam.

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