This course will be retired on June 1, 2025.

Heads up! To view this whole video, sign in with your Courses account or enroll in your free 7-day trial. Sign In Enroll

Introduction to Xamarin

Preview

Start a free Courses trial
to watch this video

Sign up for Treehouse

Setting Up Our Development Environment

4:04 with Heath Hodgert

We'll learn how to develop Xamarin apps using Visual Studio for Windows. Xamarin with Visual Studio provides new tools to allow us to create, build, deploy and debug our app. We'll also take a look at Visual Studio for Mac and discuss the difference between it and the Windows version.

New Terms:

  • .NET -- Software framework developed by Microsoft

Further Reading:

Installing Xamarin for Android
Installing Xamarin for iOS
Android Debug Bridge (adb)
Visual Studio for Windows
Xamarin Test Cloud (UI testing service)
NuGet Package Management

Virtual Machines that work for Xamarin development:

Related Discussions

Have questions about this video? Start a discussion with the community and Treehouse staff.

Sign up

    Related Discussions

    Have questions about this video? Start a discussion with the community and Treehouse staff.

    Sign up

    In this video, we'll learn about Visual Studio, and how it's used for 0:00
    Xamarin development. 0:03
    Visual Studio is a preferred IDE for developing C# mobile apps. 0:05
    When Xamarin's installed, it adds new tools to create, build, 0:11
    deploy, and debug our app. 0:16
    We'll need a computer running Windows 10. 0:20
    Because we wanna develop an app for 0:22
    iOS, we'll also need an Apple computer running the latest OS. 0:25
    We could use new Visual Studio for MAC to develop for both iOS and 0:31
    Android on a single computer. 0:35
    But for this course we'll use Visual Studio 2017. 0:37
    We can use a signal machine if it's a Mac and 0:42
    we install Windows on a virtual machine using parallels or VMware. 0:45
    We need to us one of this because the Android emulator 0:49
    runs in its own virtual machine and can conflict with other virtual machines. 0:54
    Also, virtual machines share resources. 0:59
    So, both operating systems can be less performant. 1:02
    I prefer using two machines, since it gives me the best performance. 1:07
    I use a Windows machine for Visual Studio, and 1:11
    since the Mac agent doesn't need to be powerful, I use a headless Mac Mini. 1:13
    We'll use Visual Studio 2017 for this course, but 1:19
    everything is also available in Visual Studio 2015 with up to date service packs. 1:23
    I'm going to assume that you're familiar with the basic functionality 1:29
    of Visual Studio. 1:33
    If you're new to Visual Studio or need a refresher, see the teacher's notes for 1:35
    links to resources that can help get you up to speed. 1:38
    If you haven't done any development with Xamarin before, 1:43
    you may not all the tools installed. 1:46
    To make sure, open the Tools menu and select Extensions and Updates. 1:48
    Check to see if the Xamarin for Visual Studios installed. 1:52
    If not, you'll need to do this through the Visual Studio installer. 1:57
    Under the Tools menu you select Get Tools and Features to launch the installer. 2:01
    Scroll down to the Mobile and Gaming section of the installer. 2:09
    Check the Mobile development with .NET work load to install it. 2:13
    This will take a while because it's downloading everything it needs to build 2:19
    iOS and Android mobile apps. 2:23
    Go ahead and pause the video while it installs. 2:25
    Now, with the mobile development tools installed, 2:30
    there will be a few new things in the Tools menu. 2:33
    The Android menu option will open the external Android tools. 2:36
    The Emulator Manager used to customize emulators so 2:41
    we can run without a physical Android device. 2:43
    The SDK Manager is important when we want to update Android tools and SDKs. 2:46
    The other tools, like Device Monitor and 2:52
    Android Debug Bridge are for more advanced development needs. 2:54
    The teacher's notes has more information. 2:58
    Some parts of the iOS menu will be disabled until we have loaded 3:02
    an iOS project and have a Mac agent set up. 3:05
    We'll discuss setting up a Mac agent later. 3:09
    The archive tool is for when you're ready to deploy to the store. 3:12
    If you have a Xamarin account, you can log in to get your subscriptions features. 3:19
    If we look at the Visual Studio options and scroll to the bottom, we will find 3:24
    the Xamarin settings, Android Settings allows us to change the file location of 3:28
    the JDK, SDK and NDK, which need to change when new versions are released. 3:33
    Another reason to change these locations is if you already have them installed and 3:39
    want to use your existing files. 3:43
    The iOS settings allow changes to the X code version 3:46
    used when connecting to the MAC agent. 3:49
    If you are using Visual Studio Enterprise, 3:52
    there is a nice feature called Remote Similar to Windows. 3:54
    Which will show the simulator in your Windows machine. 3:58
    So we don't need to interact with our Mac. 4:01

    You need to sign up for Treehouse in order to download course files.

    Sign up

      You need to sign up for Treehouse in order to set up Workspace

      Sign up