Are you tired of juggling multiple devices for Xamarin development? Do you wish you could harness the power of OS X without being tied to an Apple ecosystem? Look no further! In this comprehensive guide, we'll walk you through the process of setting up a virtual machine running macOS X Sierra on your Windows PC using VirtualBox.

Requirements

Before we dive in, make sure you have the following:

  • A macOS X Sierra installer or a machine with Sierra installed
  • An Intel-powered machine, preferably an i5 or higher
  • A 16GB or larger thumb drive, preferably USB 3.0 or higher
  • VirtualBox 5.x
  • Visual Studio 2015 or higher (for Xamarin development)
  • A laptop with a power source (if applicable)

Create the OS X Installer USB Drive

To get started, you'll need to create an installer for your Sierra virtual machine. This involves formatting a thumb drive and extracting the Sierra installer.

  1. Insert the thumb drive into your Mac or PC and launch Disk Utility.
  2. Format the USB drive with the name "USB" and the format of GUID Partition Map.
  3. Download the macOS Sierra installer via the App Store and save it to your Applications folder.
  4. Make a copy of the installer for safekeeping, then run Unibeast and follow the prompts.
  5. Choose Legacy boot mode and let Unibeast create the thumb drive (approximately 10 minutes on a USB 3 drive).
  6. Download Multibeast and copy it to the newly created Unibeast drive.

Create the VirtualBox USB Drive Shim

VirtualBox doesn't natively support booting from a USB drive, so we'll need to create a virtual disk that points to our thumb drive.

  1. Open Disk Management and get the Disk Number of the thumb drive.
  2. Open Command Prompt as an administrator and navigate to %programfiles%\oracle\virtualbox.
  3. Run the command VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename C:\usb.vmdk -rawdisk \\.\PhysicalDrive# to create the virtual drive pointer.

Create the VM

Now that we have our thumb drive and shim, it's time to set up our VirtualBox virtual machine.

  1. Right-click VirtualBox and select "Run as Administrator" to launch the application.
  2. Follow the instructions on this page to configure your VM, ignoring the download portion (you already have an install thumb drive).
  3. Create a new VM named "Sierra" (or whatever you prefer) and choose OS X 64-bit as the guest OS.
  4. Set the RAM to 4GB (you can adjust this later if needed).

Configure Your VM

Once your VM is set up, it's time to configure it for optimal performance.

  1. Add a virtual disk to stand in as your Mac's hard drive, using VDI format and dynamically sized at 60 GB.
  2. Confirm the settings match those below:
  • System, Motherboard, Base Memory: 4096 MB
  • System, Motherboard, Boot Order: Only Optical and Hard Disk checked
  • System, Processor, Processors: 2 CPUs

Tips and Tricks

  • Don't skimp on virtual disk size – XCode uses a lot of space when it updates.
  • Save the VM's drive to a location with enough space if you're concerned about running out.

By following these steps, you'll be well on your way to streamlining your Swift app development workflow. Happy coding!