How to enable Nuget packages restore under Xamarin Studio in Mac OS X

Question

I enabled auto-restore feature for my project under Visual Studio but when I switched to MAC and Xamarin Studio I was unable to restore those packages:

xxx.csproj: Error: This project references NuGet package(s) that are missing on this computer. Enable NuGet Package Restore to download them

Answer 1

By enabled auto-restore feature I am assuming you are referring to the MSBuild based restore which adds a NuGet.targets file to your project.

That particular error is coming from the MSBuild file:

  <Target Name="EnsureNuGetPackageBuildImports" BeforeTargets="PrepareForBuild">
    <PropertyGroup>
      <ErrorText>This project references NuGet package(s) that are missing on this computer. Enable NuGet Package Restore to download them.  For more information, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=322105. The missing file is {0}.</ErrorText>
    </PropertyGroup>
    <Error Condition="!Exists('$(SolutionDir)\.nuget\NuGet.targets')" Text="$([System.String]::Format('$(ErrorText)', '$(SolutionDir)\.nuget\NuGet.targets'))" />
  </Target>

The error condition suggests that it cannot find the .nuget\NuGet.targets file. So does this exist? Does the case of the path exactly match?

Also note that there is a problem with the NuGet.targets file on the Mac since it uses a feature of MSBuild which is not supported on Mono. The latest NuGet.targets file available from codeplex may fix this.

It might be easier to remove the MSBuild based package restore and install the NuGet addin for Xamarin Studio, and use the package restore feature from inside Xamarin Studio. To restore from within Xamarin Studio, you can right click the project and select Restore Packages.