Setting up a development machine

To develop an app for multiple platforms imposes higher demands on our development machine. One reason for this is that we often want to run one or multiple simulators or emulators on our development machine. Different platforms also have different requirements with regard to what is needed to begin development. Regardless of whether we are using Mac or Windows, Visual Studio will be our IDE. There are several versions of Visual Studio, including the free community edition. Go to https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/ to compare the available versions of Visual Studio. The following list is a summary of what we need to begin development for each platform:

• iOS: To develop an app for iOS, we need a Mac. This could either be the machine that we are developing on or a machine on our network, if we are using one. The reason that we need to connect to a Mac is that we need Xcode for compiling and debugging an app. Xcode also provides the iOS simulator. 

• Android: Android apps can be developed on either macOS or Windows. Everything you need, including SDKs and simulators, are installed with Visual Studio.

• UWP: UWP apps can only be developed in Visual Studio on a Windows machine.