Xamarin.Messaging.Broker wants firewall access

Question

After installing VS2019 16.5.1 and 16.5.2 I receive a message that Windows Defender has locked some features of Xamarin.Messaging.Broker and asking if I should allow it.

Normally I would as it seems to be part of Visual Studio but this executable is located in my appdata\local\temp file, which I would not expect it to be. Searching the net for info about this yields little in the way of good information.

Does anyoe know what it does and why on earth would you put an exe in the local user temp?

Answer 1

My message appear exactly after upgrade 16.5.0 to 16.5.3, We all see this message in 16.5.2 version and above.

So as far as we know this happened because microsoft add something new in 16.5.2 and above, It can't be anything except microsoft work since we all have seen this firewall message.

My file was in C:\users\username\appdata\local\temp\xamarin\xma\broker.local\16.5.000.533\broker.exe

This access will add a record in firewall advanced "Inbound Rules" Which means grant an access from outside to our PCs on UDP/TCP.

Conclusion :

Personaly i allowd this file in firewall because i have tons of problems in xamarin (special to connect to Mac) and i don't want to add more, I suggest you all do the same.

Answer 2

I don't know why it would be in that location, but this article lists the endpoints to allow for a xamarin firewall configuration. Perhaps it might assist in some way.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/xamarin/get-started/installation/firewall