I use Xamarin on Windows and Mac (on Mac for iOS apps).
The issue is that on Windows the Mono (Xamarin.iOS) is repeatedly updating itself and from time to time I've got this:
The Xamarin.Ios SDK version installed on Mac is not compatible with this version of Visual Studio. Would you like us to install xamarin.ios ... for you? This will overwrite any existing Xamarin.ios installation on your mac.
It's not an issue to upgrade Mac, but it is when I just need to run some code quickly and instead having that request for the update, and must spend some time for handling that. (What's more proplematic that some updates of Xamarin.iOS require newer version of XCode, which leads for me to stuck with the updates for two or more hours!!!)
However, I can't find who (what app/launcher) initiates the update of Xamarin. I've already turned off Visual Studio any auto-updates in the Scheduler etc., but the issue is still happening.
I need to control myself when I want to upgrade Xamarin exactly!
Any thoughts?
The issue was posted at Microsoft's.
As it was mentioned there:
This is indeed a known side effect of not having a direct dependency on our Windows bits to our Mono bits required on the Mac. It’s an infrastructure issue that made us need to rely on the published products to identify what Mono version is required for the known Xamarin.iOS. Due to that problem, while we know what exact Xamarin.iOS version we need to install on the Mac, we look for the latest Mono version published on the corresponding channel. That makes any new Mono update on that channel to change the requirements for pairing a given Visual Studio version to a Mac. On other words, you cannot avoid that Mono update from Visual Studio on Windows and pairing to the Mac, because the connection flow will detect an incompatible Mono version on the Mac, which is not correct.
We’re already working on an improved mechanism where Visual Studio on Windows knows exactly what’s the Mono dependency and do not rely on any updates for that, which should allow our users to stay on a given version without changing the Mono requirement on the Mac without an explicit update on Visual Studio.
As of Dec 04, 2019 it's been mentioned it's available in Preview. So, I assume, this must be fixed at least in v16.5 version of Visual Studio.