... I'm no so sure about it being the right tool for the job, to make a build for iOS for instance you have to hook up a Mac to your PC ditto Android and as Viv pointed out there are platform specific differences when building forms for instance - I naively thought Xamarin took care of all that stuff - thanks for your interest

Pete,

Xamarin *does* take care of most of that stuff, but you have to architect your app such that the parts of it that can be shared between platforms are separate from the parts that are platform-specific. It's really not too difficult to do that.

You *DO* need a Mac for compiling for iOS, but you *DO NOT* need anything special for Android apps. Xamarin includes an emulator you can use for testing Android apps. It's slow as hell, but it works. That said, it's better to test/debug with an Android device attached somewhere (to your network or directly to the dev macnine), because it's faster and easier, but it's not a requirement.

Like John, we also bought a Mac-mini for the iOS stuff, for only a couple 100 bucks. Actually, we weren't going to get it just for that reason, but as it turns out, Gary needed to get some new scanning software for his photo scanner and the only one it made sense for him to get ran on a Mac ... do now we've got the Mac hooked up to our network and use VNC to connect to it. He's already got his scanner software on it, but we have yet to try putting together a Xamarin app for iOS. Gonna get the Android one done first.