I’m happy to report that since my previous post, I am now able to build the iOS app without any difficulty. Thanks again to James Montemagno at Xamarin for his help.
BTW: My apologies for the 4-day gap between posting on the issue. I was out of town and didn’t have my Mac with me so couldn’t do the iOS part of the build.
The reason I encountered errors & warnings when building the iOS project is due to the fact that when the wizard generates the project it does not fill in 3 key fields in the project properties: Application Name, Identifier, and Version. The fields are all blank as shown here.
I filled those in with the appropriate values as shown here…
… and all builds well.
One bit of frustration is that I didn’t see anywhere in the Xamarin Hello, iPhone documentation where it said I had to fill these values in for a valid build.
Near the end of the documentation it does mention that one can edit the plist file using property pages. However, the screen shot shows the Identifier and Version fields empty giving one the impression that leaving them blank is OK.
With those values being so important, I would’ve preferred that Xamarin did one of the following (listed in my order of preference).
- Prompt for the values in the project wizard
- Default the fields to some reasonable value
In fairness, the error/warning messages do indicate that the values need to be set on the property page. It’s just that after the other headaches I was experiencing, seeing an untouched, wizard-generated project fail to build left me a bit discouraged.
IMHO – When working with a brand new environment, its critical that what comes out of the wizard must build without any errors. So often all one is trying to do is verify that the pieces are working and build errors on untouched wizard-generated projects give one the impression that something is wrong. 🙂
Build Success/Failure
One little thing that surprised me is that Visual Studio is not updating the status bar to indicate that a successful build has completed. In the case of a standard Visual Studio project, the status bar displays a message like the following indicating build success.
In the case of my VS solution containing the iPhone project, the status bar does not update with a success message as you can see here.
I’ve had to have the Output window open so that I can see when a successful build completes.
Although I haven’t tried to exhaustively diagnose the cause, the lack of a success message appears to be tied to the fact that the solution contains an iPhone project (Xamarin will often display the Mac build host IP Address in the status bar). When I create a solution containing only an Android project, the build result displays in the status bar as expected.
Xamarin.Android Beta Issue
Just to follow up on the issue I mentioned in my last post about the Xamarin.Android Beta breaking Xamarin.iOS in Visual Studio.
The folks at Xamarin have followed up and let me know that there is an incompatibility between the Xamarin.Android version that is currently in Beta and the production release of Xamarin.iOS. To safely install the Xamarin.Android Beta, I’ll need to install the corresponding Xamarin.iOS Beta … A very reasonable requirement.
You can find the bug report and Xamarin’s response here.
I’m not sure if I’m going to do the Beta installs right now or not. I may just wait for them to reach production release. I’ll keep y’all updated if I do decide to install the Betas.
Carrying On
So everything appears to now be working. I can start really digging into things now.
I do want to give Kudos to the folks at Xamarin…
So far every issue I’ve raised whether in their Forums or on their Bugzilla page has been responded to in a very reasonable time frame. Thanks guys!
Jim Wilson (a.k.a. hedgehogjim) 