Xamarin Visual Studio IOS Development Without a Mac?
Solution 1:
From May 2017, you can develop app without MAC.
Microsoft Xamarin introduce a Live Player. With Live Player, iOS apps can be deployed directly onto an iPhone or other iDevice from a PC running Visual Studio, where the code can then be tested and debugged.
WARNING The Xamarin Live Player Preview has ended. But it changed Hot Reload. With this feature, you can develop iOS app with your iPhone See discussion
See this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awgZDL1a3YI
this is Live Player Get start section: Live Player
Note: The final build and submission to the App Store will still require a Mac
Device Requirements
The Xamarin Live Player app supports the following devices:
iOS
- iOS 9.0 or later.
- ARM64 processor.
- Check the App Store for a list of supported devices.
Android
- Android 4.2 or later.
- ARM-v7a, ARM-v8a, ARM64-v8a, x86, or x86_64 processor.
Limitations
There are some limitations on the things Xamarin Live Player can run, including the items below:
- Android user interfaces designed with AXML files are not currently supported.
- Some iOS storyboard features are not supported.
- iOS XIB files are not supported.
- Custom Renderers are not supported.
- Xamarin.Forms Effects are not supported.
- Embedded resources are not supported (ie. embedding images or other resources in a PCL).
- Limited support for reflection (currently affects some popular NuGets, like SQLite and Json.NET). Other NuGets are still supported.
- Some system classes cannot be overridden (for example, you cannot implement a subclass).
- Some platform features that require provisioning can't work in the Xamarin Live Player app (however it has been configured for common operations like camera access).
- Custom targets and build steps are ignored. For example, tools like Fody cannot be incorporated.
Solution 2:
Yes, you must have a Mac to do Xamarin.iOS development. The Mac is required for building as well as running the iOS simulator. You can either use it as a build server, and actually do your development in Visual Studio (either in a standalone PC, or on a VM running on your Mac), or you can do your development directly on the Mac using Xamarin Studio as your IDE.
Solution 3:
You can use Xamarin Studio instead of Visual Studio and build iOS application by C#. First install VMware Workstation and then download OS X image and run it by VMware.
Then Install tools on it and enjoy.
Tools :
EDIT : The following links are out dated, You must install Mac OS 10.10 in order to be able to install XCode 6.
iOS Tools that you need:
1) Mac OS X image for Windows Note: Max OS X Installation Help: http://www.sysprobs.com/easily-run-mac-os-x-10-8-mountain-lion-retail-on-pc-with-vmware-image
2) Mono: http://download.xamarin.com/MonoFrameworkMDK/Macx86/MonoFramework-MDK-3.2.4.macos10.xamarin.x86.pkg
3) Xamarin Studio: http://download.xamarin.com/studio/Mac/XamarinStudio-4.2.1-1.dmg
4) MonoTouch: http://download.xamarin.com/MonoTouch/Mac/monotouch-7.0.4.209.pkg
5) Xcode