Introducing the new Xamarin stack, with Visual Studio for Mac

[viktorbenei]

The new Xamarin stack with Visual Studio for Mac (instead of Xamarin Studio) is now generally available for everyone, no invite is required anymore!

You can change the Stack on the Settings tab of the app on https://www.bitrise.io . This new stack option is called Visual Studio for Mac, Stable channel, on macOS right now (might change in the future to include Xamarin in its name).

The stack is prepared the same way as the Xamarin Studio ones, meaning it’s built on top of the latest fully provisioned Xcode (stable) stack, and so it has the same non-Xamarin tool versions (NodeJS, CocoaPods, etc.).

Update schedule for this stack is the same as for the Xamarin Studio ones, we’ll apply the latest available Visual Studio for Mac updates on it every week. For more details please see:

How are the bitrise.io stacks updated and with what frequency? What's the stack deprecation / removal policy?

The stacks on bitrise.io are updated every weekend, but what’s updated depends on the stack. There are stacks where only certain caches are updated (no preinstalled tools etc.), and there are stacks which are completely re-built every week. You can find the update type of the stacks below. Xcode stacks Xcode stacks, except the “Edge” one, are built once, and are not updated at all, except with Bitrise CLI related updates, dependency manager cache updates and with critical fixes. These are Stabl…

The same things described for Xamarin apply for this new Visual Studio for Mac stack.

In fact this stack will replace the previous Xamarin Studio stacks eventually. We’ll start deprecating the Xamarin Studio stacks in the coming weeks, keeping the Xamarin Studio options for a while but registering new Xamarin projects with the Visual Studio for Mac stack (instead of the Xamarin Studio stack), and eventually move everyone from the Xamarin Studio stacks to the Visual Studio for Mac one.

We’ll keep monitoring the error rates of these stacks and if you have any issues on this new Visual Studio for Mac stack please let us know! We won’t remove the Xamarin Studio stacks until we manage to fix all issues caused by the Xamarin Studio → Visual Studio for Mac change, but we definitely will remove the Xamarin Studio stacks in a couple of weeks, once we don’t have any known issues caused by this tool change. So, if you can, please try this new stack as soon as possible and report any issues you have. Otherwise we’ll auto-migrate all Xamarin Studio projects to this new stack during the next two weeks (keeping the option to switch back to the Xamarin Studio stack if you need it), and once all issues are fixed we’ll start to remove the Xamarin Studio stacks.

As always, if you have any questions or feedback just let us know!
Happy Building!

[viktorbenei]

Xamarin stack titles changed, to make it easier to see which stacks are Xamarin Studio and which one is the Visual Studio for Mac based:

• Xamarin Studio based stacks’ title now starts with Xamarin Studio
• The Visual Studio for Mac one was moved up in the list, to be the first Xamarin stack, and was renamed to Xamarin, Visual Studio for Mac, Stable channel, on macOS to make it clear that this stack is suitable for Xamarin projects.