Xamarin iOS — Setting up Continuous Integration using Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS)

This article is part of blog series VSTS, Xamarin and Continuous Integration. Why does it matter?

Once we set up our own brand spanking new build host. We can move ahead and create a new build definition for Xamarin iOS solution. Before doing so, there are several prerequisites we need to get in place.

Prerequisites

We will need following things in place before we can continue –

1. Permissions — You should have permissions to manage builds, process and definitions. If not, please ask your VSTS administrator to provide you with required permissions on specific project.
2. Self hosted / cloud hosted Mac agent (Setting up your own build and release agent on Mac OSX / macOS) — This article assumes we already have a build agent ready.
3. Application Certificate / Provisioning Profile — To be able to build and distribute iOS applications we need special certificates generated by Apple Developer Portal. We have a rigorous guide created by Xamarin here — https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/ios/deployment,_testing,_and_metrics/app_distribution/ad-hoc-distribution/
4. P12 certificate file — We will see how to export .p12 certificate in next section
5. TestCloud Team API Key and Devices (The devices string is generated by Xamarin Test Cloud. It can be found as the value of the –devices command line argument of a Test Cloud test run.)
6. Solution in source control with certificates inside it ( .mobileprovision and .p12)
7. Colin’s ALM Corner Custom Build Tasks

Read more at http://www.wrapcode.com/xamarin/vsts-set-up-build-definition-for-xamarin-ios/