Unable to create F# Android Project - Visual Studio 2015 Xamarin Community

Question

I'm following the dialogue options to create a new F# Android Blank Activity in the visual studio community edition from the Xamarin download page and am not having much luck. C# android projects seem to work just fine. This is the visual studio 2015 release put out just after the Xamarin open source announcement.

Once the project is created what looks to be an intro page appears for a brief moment before disappearing. The project structure was loaded in the solution explorer during the time the intro page was visible but now only shows (load failed).

Expanding the project info shows

The project requires user input. Reload the project for more information.

Attempting to refresh displays a dialog box with the text

The document 'c:\users\[me]\documents\visual studio 2015\Projects\FSharpBlankApp\FSharpBlankApp\FSharpBlankApp.fsproj' is already open. Do you want to close it?

Clicking 'Yes' performs no visible action beyond some activity in the Xamarin Diagnostics output category. The output is as follows:

[I:]:                     Tracking android devices started
[D:]:                     Tracking avd started
[D:]:                     avd watcher *.ini path: 'C:\Users\<me>\.android\avd'
[D:]:                     avd watcher android path: 'C:\Users\<me>\AppData\Local\Android\ANDROI~1\tools\android.bat'
[D:]:                     TrackDeviceTask got: 
[I:]:                     Got new device list from adb with 0 devices
[I:]:                     Tracking android devices stopped
[I:]:                     Tracking android devices started
[D:]:                     Tracking avd started
[D:]:                     avd watcher *.ini path: 'C:\Users\<me>\.android\avd'
[D:]:                     avd watcher android path: 'C:\Users\<me>\AppData\Local\Android\ANDROI~1\tools\android.bat'
[D:]:                     TrackDeviceTask got: 
[I:]:                     Got new device list from adb with 0 devices
[I:]:                     Tracking android devices stopped
[D:]:                     avd watcher: got device list from avd with 9 devices
[D:]:                     avd watcher: got device list from avd with 9 devices

I've installed this on two computers with the same results. The F# Windows templates seem to load and execute without issue. Running Visual Studio as administrator does not seem to make any difference. This is on Windows 10.

Any recommendations on resolving the issue or how to proceed from this point would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

The reason why it fails is that Xamarin expects F# 3.0 SDK to be installed. Here is a discussion on Xamarin forum about this.

You can install F# 3.0 SDK from here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=261286