Welcome to the Xamarin.Mac Forums and FAQ

ChrisHamons

Welcome to the Xamarin.Mac forum!

This is the place to:

• Ask and answer questions about how to use Xamarin.Mac and Cocoa APIs
• Share Xamarin.Mac applications, libraries, and documentation you've written

Things you shouldn't expect:

• A Xamarin employee response to every post. I spend some spare time answering questions, but this is primarily a community forum.

Please try to keep the discussions to one topic per thread!

You're welcome to discuss feature suggestions and bugs here, but to ensure that they get tracked properly, please use:

• Xamarin Bugzilla for bug reports

ChrisHamons

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Where is the Xamarin.Mac documentation?

A: The documentation lives here but we also have a series of sample application here.

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Q: How do I use NSOutlineView or NSTableView? The documentation is difficult to understand.

A: See the example here.

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Q: How do I do custom rendering to the screen / custom views or controls?

A: See the example here.

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Q: What do I do when an API I need is missing?

A: Follow the guide here.

ChrisHamons

If you are interested in learning about Xamarin.Mac, I suggest starting with this documentation:

https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/mac/getting_started/hello,_mac/

https://github.com/xamarin/mac-samples/tree/master/SourceWriter is by far the most complete sample we have, showing a full Xamarin.Mac application.

There are a number of samples in general (https://developer.xamarin.com/samples/mac/all/) but they are far from complete in covering all APIs. Often you'll need to convert objective-c stack overflow / tutorials / apple documentation to C# and this documentation will help:

https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/mac/application_fundamentals/patterns/
https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/mac/application_fundamentals/mac-apis/

The top two sections here may be useful to read:

https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/mac/application_fundamentals/troubleshooting/

and if you are the type to prefer your UI in code instead of resource files this is useful as well:

https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/mac/application_fundamentals/xibless-ui/

If you want to dig deeper "under the hood" may I suggest:

https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/mac/advanced_topics/mac-architecture/
https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/mac/advanced_topics/internals/

And the source code is the final answer for "how does this work", since it's open source:

https://github.com/xamarin/xamarin-macios