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Hi,

This is a broad question, the answer to which seems surprisingly elusive. I have a Windows 7 Pro PC with Visual Studio and a MacBook OS-X Yosemite sitting here next to it. In these days of Visual Studio being 'open-everything', with even the MSBuild tool now accessible as a standalone process, I find it difficult to believe it is not possible to set up an environment to develop from within VS a desktop/tablet app to run on Windows and OS-X.

Of course, I understand that there will need to be platform-specific code (especially in the UI), but I've done that kind of development before.

There is the Xamarin option, which looks good, but is pricey for a one-man-band like me.

Can anyone offer any advice on where I might look for help with this. I suppose ideally I would like a nice tutorial on how to go about setting up the tool chain.


Kind wishes ~ Patrick
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Richard MacCutchan 15-Apr-15 10:55am    
The obvious answer is Google for "OSX Visual Studio".
Patrick Skelton 15-Apr-15 11:12am    
Well, I have done that. It's just that I have often found that, by asking on a forum, someone posts a link to an article you have missed. Even with Google, searching the internet is no small job.

1 solution

I would say, not yet. This is what I would advise: better wait till the end of this year for Visual Studio 2015.

Alternatively, use Mono for Mac OS X and Mono for Windows. Mono for Windows will be heavily used for testing on Windows, because there is a good number of incompatibilities:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_%28software%29[^],
http://www.mono-project.com/[^].

Alternatively to Visual Studio, you can use MonoDevelop: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MonoDevelop[^].

It's not a big problem to use Mono for running many Windows applications without recompilation. On all platforms, except… the Apple's, where those System.Windows.Forms application looks foreign and ugly. Same goes for Qt and GTK+ based applications. To develop true Apple-style UI (not that I recommend it, but you might be required to do so), you will need (waste? :-)) a lot more effort. First thing you will need is monobjC:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monobjc[^],
http://www.monobjc.net/[^].

I did it; it works, but development on just a Windows system becomes too problematic, you would really need a Mac OS X system in your hands.

—SA
 
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