Three years ago I decided to try out Xamarin. Given my experience with C# and WPF/Xaml, it seemed to make sense. I spent about 4 hours following some tutorial online and got the sample application up and running. Two months later, I tried to pick it back up: I launched the idea, hit “run”, and got some compilation error that didn’t tell me a whole log. After a lot of digging around on the web, I found out I had to update Xcode. After I did, the error in Visual Studio for Mac went away. Other priorities made me put that all aside for a while.
Last weekend, I gave in and decided to pick it up again. I have an idea for a mobile app that would help me with one of my hobbies and thought Xamarin would be the quickest way for me to get it done. The first feature for the app is a simple to-do list. That’s just a step away from the typical Hello World app, isn’t it?
After 6 hours of struggling, I gave up.
I was trying to use JetBrains Rider as the IDE. I thought of creating a Xamarin.Forms app, as it seemed the easiest way to have my app available both to iPhone and Android devices. I didn’t get passed creating the project, as it kept telling me that the “Android SDK is not installed”, even after installing all the Android things I’ve found out about; things that ate up 20Gb of my disk space, and I still couldn’t create the project.
I then decided to only target iOS: maybe if I at least got the app on my iPhone I’d find motivation to figure the Android deal later.
The project got created and I just tried to run it in the iPhone emulator (I didn’t write any code or change anything). Found some references online about Xcode, made sure to update it, but still, no luck.
Then, I tried to deploy it to my iPhone. First got errors about the Apple certificate needed. My Apple Dev membership expired years ago, so I renewed it ($107!). Got the certificate, then started getting errors about “Provisioning Profile”. Got it created, did what I told to do, as per online resources, and moved on to the next error: [MSB6006] “dsymutil” exited with code 1.
After some research on the error and not liking the answers I’ve found, I gave up. Six hours had gone by and I couldn’t successfully create and run a brand new project.
I’ll be trying Flutter next. Let’s see how that goes…
Claudio Lassala's Blog 
#1 by Ryan Riley on November 30, 2020 - 3:08 pm
If you want to stick to C#, you could give [RemObjects](https://www.remobjects.com/default.aspx) a try. I really enjoyed using it for some learning projects earlier in the summer and really enjoyed it.
#2 by claudiolassala on November 30, 2020 - 9:01 pm
Thanks, Ryan. I haven’t heard of that option before (which makes me wonder whether how deep I should look into it…). I see that their C# IDE costs 49/month; that’s steep.
I don’t mind paying for my tools, but that’d be too much for my little side projects. 🙂
#3 by Michael Steinberg on November 30, 2020 - 7:38 pm
It is good to know that I am not the only person who has problems like that 🙂
#4 by claudiolassala on November 30, 2020 - 9:02 pm
🙂 I don’t really have time available to be dealing with this kind of problem.