Not able to create a Xamarin-component for android Source code

Question

• I have used the command

xamarin-component.exe package C:\\cmp\\AndroidComponent\\component 

for creating Xamarin component.While building th

Answer 1

We ran into the same issue; you were close to the right answer, and the forums had the correct one.

First lets look at the portion of code that is erroring (Xamarin.Android.Common.targets; in the newer versions of Xamarin this code is much further down):

<Target Name="_GetReferenceAssemblyPaths">
<GetReferenceAssemblyPaths
        TargetFrameworkMoniker="$(TargetFrameworkIdentifier),Version=v1.0"
        RootPath="$(TargetFrameworkRootPath)">
    <Output TaskParameter="ReferenceAssemblyPaths" PropertyName="_XATargetFrameworkDirectories" />
</GetReferenceAssemblyPaths>

The most important part here is the

$(TargetFrameworkRootPath)

When NuGet is ran via the command line we see that it is using the 64bit MSBuild Executable:

MSBuild auto-detection: using msbuild version '14.0' from 'C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\14.0\bin\amd64'.

(You correctly identified this yourself above) but just to be clear for anyone following along.

When you use the 64bit version of MSBuild $(TargetFrameworkRootPath) gets defined as C:\Program Files\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework However Xamarin does not install any of the Framework Utilities to that directory; instead everything lives in the x86 version here C:\Program Files (x86)\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework

When you read online a ton of people get this problem solved by installing Visual Studio 2017; but that is a red-herring it only works because it causes NuGet to use MSBuild 15 which ships with Visual Studio 2017 which apparently is not affected by this bug.

There are a few ways to fix this issue:

1. Tell NuGet to use the x86 MSBuild when you Restore using the optional -MSBuildPath argument as described here How Can I Tell NuGet What MSBuild Executable to Use?
2. Upgrade to Visual Studio 2017 to get MSBuild 15
3. Define $(TargetFrameworkRootPath) to be C:\Program Files (x86)\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework; this can be done however you please, the biggest hammer is to set it as an environment variable in the environment prior to execution. Note this will probably cause a bunch of unintended side-affects if you're not careful. <- DON'T DO THIS, Even as suggested in the forms.