“This project requires the Visual Studio update to load” when creating the Xamarin.Forms cross-platform application

Question

When I create the Xamarin.Forms application using Visual Studio Community 2015 Community on Windows 8.1, it shows me this error while loading:

 A problem was encountered creating the sub project 'App1.WinPhone'. This project requires a Visual Studio update to load. Right-click on the project and choose 'Download Update' 

I installed all available updates and tried the recently installed Windows.

Note. I had this error in Forms.

How can I fix this error?

Note. There is no Download Update option in Solution Explorer.

Answer 1

Uninstall Xamarin completely and reinstall it. It happened to me. I will also uninstall Visual Studio. Install this first, then install Xamarin.

Edit: I know this sucks, but that was what the Xamarin team forced me to do to allow this. As far as I know, this is an official decision last week.

Answer 2

Navigate to where you saved the project files created in Visual Studio. The default location is C:\Users\PSDan\Documents\Visual Studio 2015\Projects .

Open the project folder that you encountered, and go to the folder C:\Users\PSDan\Documents\Visual Studio 2015\Projects\test\test\test.Windows . Inside this folder is a file called test.Windows.csproj .

Right-click on this file and open it ... using Visual Studio, after doing this, it should detect the missing package and in my case automatically request the installation of the missing package.

Answer 3

I saw similar errors for .Window or .WindowPhone, and what I observed is that this is due to the lack of an SDK. The same can be with you.

Do you see App1Droid appearing in the solution? (I think no)

Go to the file explorer and find App1.Droid.csproj (.. \ App1 \ App1.Droid \ App1.Droid.csproj) and open it in a new instance. The Install Missing Feature dialog box appears, and you can follow the steps to install the missing components.

Answer 4

If your problem is the same as here:

The project required updating Visual Studio

then you can try and see if this solution works:

[Reason] is the version and profile mismatch of the target structure in the .csproj file. Despite the fact that the target structure is correct in the project properties, they were not saved correctly for any reason. Thus, when he tried to install the utility library from nuGet, he left my project in the state you specified.

The decision was to go through this site:

Framework Profiles in .NET

and find the correct combination, then manually edit the .csproj file to configure <TargetFrameworkProfile> and <TargetFrameworkVersion> .

Answer 5

Installing Visual Studio Update 3 with the selected features "Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.0 / 8.1" and "Cross Platform Mobile Development" solved the problem for me.