When developing cross-platform mobile apps, you currently have a choice of using either Xamarin Studio or Microsoft's Visual Studio development environments. It is worth noting that, although the screenshots and example code used throughout this book have been developed using Xamarin Studio running on an Apple Macintosh computer, the code should compile fine on a Windows machine running Microsoft Visual Studio 2015.
However, there are some differences that you need to be aware of before embarking on the journey of building your mobile development solutions. If you are running Xamarin Studio on a Windows machine, you will get an Android project solution whenever you create a new Xamarin.Forms
solution.
If you want to integrate and develop apps for Windows Phone, you will need to ensure that you are running Microsoft Visual Studio on a Windows machine. When developing apps for iOS applications, you will need to prepare your Mac to be the Xamarin build host by firstly enabling Remote Login on your Mac within the System Preferences section, and then selecting the Mac to be the build host from within the Microsoft Visual Studio environment on your Windows machine.
Note
For more information on how to prepare your Mac to be the Xamarin build host, refer to the Xamarin developer documentation at https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/ios/getting_started/installation/windows/connecting-to-mac/.
Now that you have an understanding of the differences between Xamarin Studio and Microsoft Visual Studio, our next step is to compile, build and run the TrackMyWalks
application within the iOS simulator.