Can we get Visual Studio for Mac alpha and beta stacks for Xamarin apps?

Can we get alpha and beta Visual Studio for Mac stacks for Xamarin apps?

We’re experiencing a Xamarin bug (https://bugzilla.xamarin.com/show_bug.cgi?id=56962) that is fixed in the beta build stack.

But the only beta build stacks are Xamarin Studio stacks, which are deprecated per Stack Deprecation: please switch from Xamarin Studio to Visual Studio for Mac. The only reason I’m still on VS for Mac stack is because it’s the only beta stack available.

(locally I’m building with VS for Mac beta).

Thanks!

  • Lee
2 Likes

Sure, definitely!

Our plan right now is to keep the Xamarin Studio Stable and LTS stacks a bit longer, and first replace the Alpha and Beta ones completely with the Visual Studio for Mac equivalents.

We’re still evaluating whether we want to keep the Alpha stacks, or only Stable + Beta (+ LTS), due to the non popularity of the Alpha stack (there’s only a handful of projects using it), but we’ll probably keep Alpha too.

1 Like

Any chance of getting VS4Mac beta channel stack earlier/in addition to having Xamarin Studio stacks?

Since .NET Standard 2.0 is now final and VS4Mac stable doesn’t support it, having a beta stack is kinda crucial at this point.

EDIT: In my case I can’t use dotnet build, since my .NET Standard 2.0 library references Xamarin.Forms (latest prerelease), which in turn uses/depends on PCL, which dotnet doesn’t work with.

@Dids can you install the .Net version you need?

We’ll definitely provide the VS4Mac Beta, but will most likely take some time. We might have some time for it this week and release it on the weekend, but might require more time (and so won’t be released this week).

If you install the .Net Core version you need then you don’t depend on the stack update.

I’m already using .NET Core, but as I mentioned Xamarin.Forms isn’t compatible with it and needs to be build with msbuild instead:
https://github.com/dotnet/cli/issues/5457
https://bugzilla.xamarin.com/show_bug.cgi?id=53694

Got it. I can’t promise anything but will try to push out the VS4Mac Beta stack as soon as possible.

1 Like

@Dids the Visual Studio for Mac Beta stack will be introduced this weekend, as well as the Stable one will be upgraded:

@leeflannery how important would be the Alpha stack for you? The Beta will be available this weekend in addition to the Stable channel stack, but we’re discussing the removal of the Alpha channel stack as it’s only used by a handful of projects which would most likely work on Beta too.

The Alpha channel isn’t important for the project I’m on.

Beta is useful when we stumble upon a bug and find that the Xamarin team has it fixed in “the next release.” Then we can try out the fix a little early on Beta. We haven’t had to go deep enough to need the Alpha.

So, speaking only for my interests - I wouldn’t miss Alpha if it went away.

Just a heads up that the most recent stable channel version of VS4Mac fixed my issues, so I can use msbuild in combination with dotnet to build my projects. :slight_smile:

1 Like

Thanks @leeflannery for the info! I think we’ll remove the Alpha option with the removal of the Xamarin Studio stacks, but of course if there would be a use case for it any time in the future we’re always open to add it back again.

@Dids coming tomorrow! :wink: Weekly Virtual Machine / Stack updates - 2017.08.19 - Visual Studio for Mac, Beta channel stack

@Dids VS4Mac Beta stack is now available :tada:

1 Like

Any word on when the VS4Mac stable stack will be updated to the latest, to support iOS 11?

Confusingly enough, currently both beta and alpha versions of VS4Mac only support up to iOS 10, but they do contain newer versions of Mono, which fixes a bunch of iOS specific LLVM issues.

I have no idea why Microsoft/Xamarin decided to only update the stable branch to support iOS 11 and not all branches at the same time, makes it hard to choose between bug fixes/iOS 11 support. :stuck_out_tongue:

1 Like

Yeah, they frequently do strange updates like that :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Xamarin stacks will be upgraded to Xcode 9 this weekend, following our usual update schedule.

1 Like

Related update - will go live tomorrow:

Just a headsup that the beta channel now has both 15.4 and iOS 11 support. :slight_smile:

1 Like

Thanks @Dids, we’ll roll out the update this weekend! :blush: