Avoiding merge problems when sharing solution between Xamarin Studio and Visual Studio

Question

When sharing a solution between Xamarin Studio and Visual Studio, changes to solution/projects leads to unexpected results. The source text of the .sln/.project files has unexpected modifications, e.g.

• UUIDs changed from lower to upper case
• Reordering of lines in the .sln file
• Changed "ToolsVersion"
• Changed "Visual Studio" version
• Other changes, like changing line break, changed "true" to "True", ...

This e.g. happens when changing the startup project, adding referenced projects, building the solution.

These changes lead to a "commit ping pong" between Xamarin Studio and Visual Studio users, and make merging harder. We experienced this problem with Xamarin Studio 5.5.4 and Visual Studio 2013 Update 4. The https://github.com/perpetual-mobile/SharingXamarinSolution repository contains examples. The http://forums.xamarin.com/discussion/comment/95851 thread also describes this issue.

How can this problem be avoided? Is it possible to prevent this from happening when using only Xamarin Studio and Visual Studio? Or do we need an additional tool (like e.g. cmake)?

Answer 1

One answer is to wait for version 6 of Xamarin Studio.

According to the bug report filed by Stephan Palmer, the issues raised above have been resolved in that version.