Get Xamarin iOS up and running with VS 2015 and a Mac

Today I want to demonstrate how to setup Xamarin iOS in Visual Studio with the use of your Mac as a simulator for your iOS apps.

First of all I assume that you already installaled Xamarin for Visual Studio, if not, please follow this documentation on MSDN.

If you first create a new Xamarin iOS project, a message box will appear to walk your through the required steps to setup your Xamarin Mac Agent.

Setup Xamarin Mac Agent in Visual Studio

First you want to activate the remote login on your Mac.

Like stated on the tutorial, just hit cmd and space and start to type “Remote Login” and then hit “Sharing”.

Next select “Remote Login” on the left side of the “Sharing” window on your Mac.

Next you want to add your username on the right side, at the “Allow access for” section, just hit the small plus sign on the bottom.
If you are not aware of your username, just hit cmd + space and type “Terminal”. Open a new terminal window and type “whoami”, the result will be your actual username.

If everything is setup correctly, it should look like that:

Back on you Visual Studio you want to connect to your Mac via the agent.

If your Mac is not listed here, hit “Add Mac…” from the bottom left corner and enter the IP address of your Mac. If you do not know the address, open a terminal window again and type “ifconfig” on the prompt. It will show your IP as result, propably at “en0” and after “inet”.

Next you want to hit “Connect…”, provide your password and you are ready to go.

To start the iOS simulator, just select simulator from the top in Visual Studio and then hit run. After a little while, the simulator should show off on your Mac.

Troubleshooting

If you have problems to connect, make sure you have installed the latests version, or at least the same version, of Xamarin for Visual Studio and also for Xamarin for Mac. (As time of writing this post it is 4.1).