Setting Up The Environment For Mobile Development

(Part 2 of the Panzer General Portable Project)

I tried, I really did, to use my ultra-hyped personal computer running Win10 and Visual Studio 2017 to create a Xamarin phone app.  Things were actually OK until I tried to launch the emulator for iOS and Android.  The machine just fell on its face and after waiting several minutes for the simulator to launch… and then crash, I gave up.

Also, since you need a Mac to publish to the Apple store, it made sense to go out and get a MacBook.  I know that you can “rent a Mac” for Apple store deployment using services like Azure Dev Ops, but:

• I would have to develop on a PC (see the paragraph above)
• I couldn’t debug on a real device
• Everyone, I mean everyone, I talked to about writing a phone app said to get a Mac to reduce friction
• I could finally look like a hipster hacker at the local Starbucks

Getting started with a MacBook wasn’t particular hard – though I had to retrain some muscle memory for the keyboard shortcuts.  Visual Studio for Mac certainly has some quirks that are worth mentioning (some of which I documented here):

1) VS sits on top of XCode.  If XCode has an update, VS may not recognize it, so it will break.  A rule of thumb is to manually update XCode whenever there is a VS update, and manually update VS whenever there is an XCode Update

2) Managing files in the .fsproj file is not seamless.  F# requires the files to be in a certain order for dependency management which allows the awesomeness of inferred typing when compiling.  In Visual Studio for the PC, you can hold down the shift key and move your files up and down.  There is no such feature in VS for Mac so you need to open the .fsproj file and manually move things as demonstrated here

3) Some some random reason, my solution would stop building and I would get the following errors.

I put it into User Voice here – until then, I just recreate a new project.  Obviously once I start coding for real, this is not a good solution,