Simple ETO application disappears on Mac with no error

[Ezra Schwartz]

I've made a super simple application, one button as the form content that shows a message box, and one button in the menu that shows a message box.  I compile on Windows and can get the .app to run on Mac, and the buttons work fine, but if you resize or move the window, it very soon disappears without any message.  This happens on both my quite old Mac running El Capitan, as well as on someone else's new Mac running the newest OS.  The test project works fine as a WPF application on Windows without the disappearance issue.

I added Eto.Platform.Mac version 2.3.0 to the project using NuGet.

Any idea what I could try next, or if this could be an issue with the Eto.Platform.Mac dll?

Thank you very much,

Ezra

[curtis]

Hey Ezra,

You're probably running into this bug, which is in mono's current "stable" 4.6 release.  The bug in their bugzilla is not public, but I believe this is fixed with mono 4.8 which you can download here.

Hope this helps!

Curtis.

[Ezra Schwartz]

That seems to have done it!  Thank you so much, I should have asked sooner and saved myself some headache!  I had everything working previously and had assumed I had set something up incorrectly this time.

[Ezra Schwartz]

When I run the .app file on a Mac without Mono installed it shows a popup that installs Mono.  Is there a way to make that popup download the 4.8 beta version instead of the one with the bug?

Thanks again.

[curtis]

Hey Ezra,

The launcher is from monodevelop when compiling a monomac app.  You may be able to create your own launcher by tweaking some of Xamarin.Mac's code here.

Hope this helps!

Curtis.

[Ezra Schwartz]

I'm having a further issue with this.  On my old iMac running El Capitan, my application is running fine.  But I'm being told by users that it is still disappearing right after it loads.  

One savvy user figured out how to get it to run, but I'm so Mac illiterate that I'm unable to properly use his findings.  

He got it to run by opening the application contents, going into the MacOS folder and removing the .exec extension from Launcher.  He then right clicked on Launcher and selected Open With -> Terminal.  He says this causes the application to work on his system without problem.   I followed the same steps on my test computer and it worked nicely.

After removing the .exec extension, when I try to run the program from the Applications directory, I get the message "The application "xxx" cannot be opened".  I tried editing info.plist to remove the .exec extension from where it lists Launcher, but I still get the same error.

Like I said I know very little about ios.  Do you understand why his change worked, and what I can do to my .app directory to get it to run on other systems?  

[curtis]

Hi Ezra,

The .exec extension is probably not what's causing the issue.  Removing the extension only makes it so finder can present you with a "Open with > Terminal" option.  You can test this by opening the command line, and running the .exec file directly.  E.g. /path/to/MyApp.app/Contents/MacOS/Launcher.exec

Unfortunately, I haven't run into this issue other than the user running Mono 4.6, so if they indeed do have Mono 4.8 installed and it's still crashing immediately then there's possibly something else going on.

Hope this helps!

Curtis.