Mac Visual Studio 8.2.6.26 update not showing any iOS simulators, only Generic Simulator

Question

Yesterday I updated my Visual Studio and Xcode. Immediately afterward I lost any listing of available iOS simulators for my Xamarin project in Visual Studio. I can plug my iPhone in however and deploy my project onto it just fine, but I'm used to working with Preview in VS and also running a simulator for quicker response.

I'm currently running the following versions:

• Updated to Xcode 11 (11A420a)

• Visual Studio Mac 8.2.6.26

• Mac OS 10.14.6

• iOS 13.0 on iPhone 7+

Now Visual Studio shows the only available simulator as being the Generic Simulator with a hammer, which doesn't launch anything that I can tell. When I look at the list to choose a simulator I see the message line: "Lower the 'Deployment Target' to see older simulators or check your Apple SDK path"

When I launch a test project directly from within Xcode, it offers iPhone 8, 8+, 11, 11 Pro and others as available simulators and those indeed work. In Visual Studio I have changed each Deployment Target from 6.0 to 12.2 and not one of those makes available any simulators.

I'm not sure what the Apple SDK path is about, how to check it and where it needs to be pointing.

Does anyone have any thoughts about what adjustments need to be made to regain my iOS simulators in Visual Studio Mac again after these updates?

Thanks so much :)

Answer 1

After trying a bunch of suggestions, this simple fix worked for me. First I changed my deployment target in the info.plist from 9.3 to 11. After checking that my Apple SDK path in VS was pointing at Xcode11 and the iOS SDK version on my Mac was 13.0, I simply force quit Visual Studio and Restarted my computer. Then I began to see iPhone8 & iPhone11 simulators. Goodluck.

Answer 2

Updating both XCode and Visual Studio for Mac worked for me.

Just updating XCode did not work.

I also fidgeted with the Deployment Target which I believe refreshed the simulators list.

UPDATE: I confirm again that when I go to info.plist and just click on the deployment target drop down, the simulators list gets update. Little funny.

Answer 3

Ran into this issue many times for the last updates. Nothing really helped, until I came across a Microsoft forum where someone mentioned the Apple SDK path needs a trailing slash, which is not added when using the Browse button to navigate to the Apple SDK Location.

So when using Visual Studio for Mac, navigate to Visual Studio -> Preferences -> Projects -> SDK Locations -> Apple and please note your Apple SDK Location should be something like:

/Applications/Xcode.app/

rather than

/Applications/Xcode.app