Cross-platform iOS and Android using Visual Studio 2013

Question

I'm building an app for android and iOS. I have decided to use Xamarin to do this, however my macbook is too slow to run Xamarin Studio efficiently and is having trouble with the iPhone/Android emulators. So I am using my Windows PC with Core i7 and 8gb ram.

I installed Xamarin Studio and noticed there is no option for iOS development.

It seems the only option is to get Visual Studio 2013 and use the "Shared project reference manager" extension instead of the old "Project Linker" extension.

I can't seem to find any tutorials online showing how to set this up and how to create cross-platform apps using this.

Would anyone be able to provide me with a quick explanation on how to set this up so I can do cross-platform development (Android & iOS) on Visual Studio 2013?

Are there any links to tutorials on how to actually create the cross-platform apps this way? I can only find tutorials on Xamarin Studio and the "Project Linker" extension, not the "Shared project reference manager".

Would I be better off getting an older version of Visual Studio and using "Project Linker"?

Answer 1

In most cases there is no significant difference switching from Xamarin Studio to Visual Studio, but Xamarin does maintain some articles specific to VS,

http://developer.xamarin.com/guides/cross-platform/windows/visual-studio/

Answer 2

In order to do iOS development from Visual Studio, you NEED a Mac to act as your build host. Your build host can be a different physical Mac, or alternatively (which works much better in my opinion), use a physical Mac that runs a Windows VM for Visual Studio. Either way, a Mac is required.

http://developer.xamarin.com/guides/ios/getting_started/installation/windows/introduction_to_xamarin_ios_for_visual_studio/