Visual Studio for Mac Community 7.7.4 (build 1)
I went info one of my .NETStandard 2.0 projects and added a string MyLabelTitle to its AppResources.resx file.
I reference this string in my code like so:
AppResource.MyLabelTitle
This will build successfully and that is great.
However, lots of online forums, documentations, Xamarin forums, StackOverflow questions that I have seen state that AppResource.Designer.cs file will regenerate itself when you rebuild your project. Some suggest ignoring it in git as well.
To test that, I reverted back my changes (I am using git) from AppResource.Designer.cs so the end result is that:
Based on my understanding, rebuilding the project will pick up my change from AppResource.resx file and add it to AppResource.Designer.cs file.
However, building my iOS or Android project will now fail to build because it is referencing one of strings I added in AppResource.resx file.
This string is still present in AppResource.resx file but it wasn't regenerated inside AppResource.Designer.cs and as a result my project is unable to reference that string.
UNSUCCESSFUL ATTEMPT TO SOLVE
I thought that if I comment out the line of code referencing AppResource.MyLabelTitle, I should be able to build successfully and it did build successfully, but the string MyLabelTitle still was not picked from AppResource.resx file and re-generated inside AppResource.Designer.cs file. As a result, I cannot reference that string anymore in my code.
How to resolve this issue?
I suspect you also posted this problem on the Visual Studio for Mac community forum but will answer it here in case anybody looks here instead.
Visual Studio for Mac does not re-generate the associated .cs files for .resx files when building. It will re-generate the .cs file when the .resx file is saved in the text editor.
One problem here is that the .resx file needs to have unsaved changes otherwise the .cs file will not be re-generated.
Android projects will re-generate their Resources.designer.cs file on building. This .cs file is generated based on the contents of the various .axml files in the project not any .resx files.
There is an addin you can install which might help here. It provides a way to run all custom tools for the solution or project manually or when a build is run.