[macios-devel] Xamarin.Mac Extension Support Ready for General Availability

[Chris Hamons]

Extension support for macOS is one of the primary features of Cycle 8 Xamarin.Mac, and has been in active development for awhile. Since the development has been done in xamarin-macios, anyone interested has been able to build Xamarin.Mac themselves once the branch was first landed [1]. 

However, now that the infrastructure is in place to publish builds from Jenkins, and the samples / documentation is in better shape, it is much easier to test out extensions before they land in Cycle 8 later this year.

- Install Xamarin.Studio on macOS and update to the builds in the Alpha Channel (Xamarin Studio -> Check for Updates).
- Download a recent build from cycle8 or xcode8 [2]. There were a few issues related to the static registrar that were hammered out since the last Alpha refresh.
- Read the important information in our documentation [3] to learn about some limitations and known issues.
- Try out the sample [4].
- Please report any issues you find to bugzilla [5]!

Thanks!
-- Chris H


[1] - http://lists.dot.net/pipermail/macios-devel/2016-May/000003.html
[2] - https://github.com/xamarin/xamarin-macios/wiki#continuous-builds
[3] - https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/mac/platform-features/extensions/
[4] - https://developer.xamarin.com/samples/mac/ExtensionSamples/
[5] - https://bugzilla.xamarin.com/