Creating First Xamarin.Forms App On MacOS

Introduction

In this short article, I will explain how to create a sample Xamarin.Forms project and run Android/iOS app in Visual Studio 2019 for Mac.

The truth is something very simple, so we will do this in just 6 steps, which are the following:

#Note

It should be noted that you will not see or touch how to install Visual Studio for Mac, since this is very simple to do.

Step 1

Let's open Visual Studio 2019 on our Mac machine and on the right side we will have two options which are: Open and New. It is worth mentioning that we can click on the Open option to open an existing Xamarin project and on the New option to create a project from scratch, which will be the option we will choose.

Step 2

After clicking on the New option, VS will navigate to the following screen, where on the left side, we can see several sections, but we will focus on the Cross-platform section, then we must select and click on Application -> Application blank -> Next.

Step 3

After clicking on the Next button, VS will navigate to the next screen, where we will have to set the name of our application to blank, we will also have to cover the identified organization and then click on the Next button.

It should be noted that we can disable any OS option and therefore the application for said platform will not be created, but I do not recommend it, since the idea of Xamarin.Forms is that we can create a project and launch it for Android as well as for iOS, therefore both are selected by default.

Step 4

After clicking the Next button, VS will navigate to the following screen, where we will have to configure the path where we want the project to be generated (we can leave the default path if we want) and we can also check the Control box of Versions if we will place it in a repository and if this project will be shared with other developers. Then click on the Create button.

Step 5

After clicking the Create button, VS will navigate to the following screen, where we will see the created Xamarin.Forms project as such, along with the PCL-Portable (XamVG) class library, XamVG.Android and XamVG.iOS

Step 6

Finally, we can select the debugging mode in Android or iOS and configure the project that we want to execute, it is worth mentioning that from the selected OS we can see the different options that we have, either through physical devices or simulators.

Result / Output

iOS

Android

Summary

I hope this little article has given you enough information to create a Xamarin project and run the app on both Android and iOS.

I take advantage of the space to invite you to leave a comment if you want me to give more details about anything in this article.

#Happy Coding