Settings up continuous integration can be tricky when there are new versions coming out. Recently Visual Studio 2019 updated to support Xcode 11, iOS 13, Android 10, .NET Core 3, and C# 8. What a whirlwind of new updates that CI servers got all around the same time! This means that as you were updating your apps your hosted machines also got updated and probably broke your builds :(. My good friend Jonathan Peppers wrote an amazing tool called Boots that allows you to manually install dependencies and previews of Xamarin and Mono.
This is great, but it also means that your build takes a little bit longer to manually install items. Did you know that Azure DevOps has all of the latest bits installed on their hosted agents and even have simple scripts enabling you to decide what version of Xamarin and Mono to run? Here is what you need to know to build your apps in Azure DevOps with C# 8, iOS 13, and Android 10.
Use macOS 10.14
Be sure that you select the latest version of macOS to build your iOS and Android apps on. You can simply specify macOS-latest or macOS-10.14 in your Pipeline settings.
You can find what software is installed here.
Install .NET Core
This may sound funny to install .NET Core for a Xamarin build, but the latest reference assemblies and build system require it. You can find what version of .NET Core is compatible with Visual Studio for Mac on the docs site.
You can add the Use .NET Core task to install .NET Core 2.2.x or 3.0.x. Either work just fine.
Set Xamarin & Mono Version
This next task is very important as it will tell the build agent what version of Xamarin and Mono to use when compiling the app. I like to define a variable with the version number in the format Major_Minor_Revision. For the latest we will use 6_4_0:
Then we will add a task to run a bash script to set the version of Xamarin. This is done with the following inline script:
sudo $AGENT_HOMEDIRECTORY/scripts/select-xamarin-sdk.sh $(MonoVersion)
That is it! Now you are good to go to build your apps with C# 8, iOS 13, and Android 10!
More DevOps!
Looking for more DevOps? Checkout my Channel 9 series on DevOps for Mobile Developers where I walk you through everything you need to know about DevOps with my friend Abel.
