cannot get visual studio connected to mac

Question

I've tried to get Visual Studio 2019 (Community Edition) working with a Mac to create a Mobile app iOS and Android. Unfortunatly I'm struggling the whole day wit this combination.

My current issue, which I cannot solve myself is the following error in Visual Studio on Windows:

An unexpected error occurred while checking the SSH configuration of '192.168.178.74'
An item with the same key has already been added.

I tried to change the MAc Address of the virtual machin to get a new IP Adress, without success

my setup:

• Visual Studio 2019 Comunity with Xamarin
• Mac OS Catalina in VM Ware on same machine than Windows 10
• XCode 11.3.1
• Visual Studio for Mac Community 8.4.8 (build 2)

Btw. I forgot to mention, that it is possible to log in to the Mac via ssh from Windows.

Answer 1

My fix to this issue was to delete the hosts.key file in this directory

%LOCALAPPDATA%\Xamarin\MonoTouch

Answer 2

I had not Monotouch folder, so I created it manually and run VS using Administrator privileges. This solved my problem.

Answer 3

I was able to get this working. It seems that running chmod og-w "$HOME" on the MacOS device fixed it for me.

However, I'm not 100% sure that was the only step because I've been debugging this for hours, so everything I did might be unnecessary, but if the above doesn't work alone, here is everything I did:

1. Followed steps from https://github.com/xamarin/xamarin-macios/issues/7882#issuecomment-604330852 to copy old scp (again, don't know if this was necessary)
2. Restart both machines just so you're sure you have a clean slate.
3. On the PC, delete contents of %LOCALAPPDATA%\Xamarin\MonoTouch directory (leave the directory itself)
4. On the Mac, clear contents of ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file
5. On the Mac, delete ~/Library/Caches/Xamarin/XMA directory
6. On the Mac, run chmod og-w "$HOME"
7. On the PC, start Visual Studio and try to connect