How to Deploy Xamarin 4.8 Apps to Simulator with VS Code on Mac After Migration?

Lefteris Michailidis 0 Reputation points
2024-09-04T13:20:17.9666667+00:00

Hi everyone,

With Visual Studio for Mac being dropped, I’ve migrated to using VS Code for Mac and am using Meteor as a simulator for my Xamarin 4.8 app development.

I’m trying to deploy a Xamarin 4.8 application to the simulator, but I’ve encountered an issue. It seems that the C# Dev Kit in VS Code requires projects to be in SDK-style format. From what I understand, only the libraries can be converted to SDK-style, but not the apps themselves (i.e., Android/iOS Xamarin projects).

Is there an official or recommended way to continue deploying Xamarin iOS apps to simulators using VS Code? What would be the best approach in this scenario, considering that VS for Mac is no longer available?

Thank you for your insights!

Xamarin
Xamarin
A Microsoft open-source app platform for building Android and iOS apps with .NET and C#.
5,336 questions
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.
987 questions

1 answer

Sort by: Most helpful
Most helpful Newest Oldest
  1. Bruce (SqlWork.com) 64,161 Reputation points
    2024-09-05T19:54:13.2166667+00:00

    vscode does not support Xamarin form projects as you have found out. and it is nowhere near as robust as Visual Studio for Mac. for full IDE support you need vs 2024 in a windows vm.

    You should use Visual Studio for Mac until you upgrade your project to Maui. you will be forced to upgrade once new releases of the mobile runtimes are required to sign anyway. IOS will give the most trouble when it starts to require Xcode 16 to sign as it's unlikely to be supported by the Xamarin tool chain. if I had to guess, Maui 9 will probably be required to support (and sign) iOS 18 applications.

    0 comments

Your answer

Answers can be marked as Accepted Answers by the question author, which helps users to know the answer solved the author's problem.