CRM & Cloud

Xamarin > How to Enable Live Player

A few days ago i upgraded my visual studio from 15.7 to 15.8 and I noticed that Live Player option is showing no more. I looked into it and found the solution.
Please use below steps to enable the Xamarin Live Player.

Go to Tools -> Options ->Xamarin ->Other
Tick mark the "Enable Xamarin Live Player" option

That is it. Go to device list drop down and verify that Live Player option is listed.

Xamarin Android > PANIC: Missing emulator engine program for 'x86' CPU

Unknown 9:14 PM Xamarin , 0 Comments

I updated my Adroid SDK and right after that everything stops working and I started getting error message "PANIC: Missing emulator engine program for 'x86' CPU".

I started looking into this issue and found that on the Visual Studio output following command was being set:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Android\android-sdk\tools\emulator.EXE -partition-size 512 -no-boot-anim -avd Android_Accelerated_x86_Oreo -prop monodroid.avdname=Android_Accelerated_x86_Oreo

while my path to the emulator when i checked is:

C:\"Program Files (x86)\Android\android-sdk\emulator.EXE

Further I noticed that when I tried to run emulator from command line from path "C:\"Program Files (x86)\Android\android-sdk\emulator.EXE" the emulator was getting started but from path "C:\Program Files (x86)\Android\android-sdk\tools\emulator.EXE" it was giving the same error message PANIC..

So until here i understood the issue that what is the problem I was dealing with, only thing i had to do was to point my visual studio to start new emulator instead of the older one.

When i googled visual studio forum to check the fix for this issue then i found that it is a known bug and it is going to be fixed in release 15.8 while current release is 15.7.6.

This is what Microsoft official replied:

Added a solution by Jon Douglas [MSFT] · May 15 at 08:00 PMThank you for your feedback! We have fixed this issue and it's available in a future version of Visual Studio. This issue came down to our IDEs using the old outdated tools/emulator path when Google moved emulator items in 25.0.3 to emulator/emulator instead. We have updated this path and thus consider this behavior fixed. Expect this to be inside a 15.8 proper release and we will work on trying to get it in a 15.7 SR if possible.
Question

URL: https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/content/problem/252854/unable-to-start-android-emulator-from-within-visua.html

So after getting to know there is not proper fix so I started to look into workarounds..

The workaround I found is very simple, please follow below steps:

Go to "Open Android Device Manager"
Delete the existing Device
Create a New device and MUST select "Google Play Store"
Click "Create"

Xamarin Android > Cold Boot: Snapshot doesn't exist

Unknown 7:44 PM Xamarin , 0 Comments

Referring to this post, more issues came across and a new weird issue which was being displaying over the simulator when i was starting it, the issue was stating "Cold Boot: Snapshot doesn't exist".

I started browsing and googling this issue and came across that this is not even an issue. As s developer you don't need to worry about it. Please do not apply any fixes or any configuration settings or no need to create any environment variables.

In order to increase the start up performance and faster boot time of the emulators, its previous state is saved always. This enables the developers to not wait longer each time. So whenever you will start your emulator first time you will see this message. Let your emulator run and continue until you see a proper mobile screen. After you see the mobile desktop, please shutdown and close your emulator. You will see following message when you will do exactly as i mentioned:

It will save the state and on your next try the emulator will be loaded fast and it won't display any message that will worry you.

Xamarin : hardware virtualization is not enabled on this computer and is required to use haxm.

Unknown 5:55 PM Xamarin , 0 Comments

I build a Xamarin app in visual studion 2017 and it all worked fine. But in the visual studio verbose i saw there was a message that updates are available and i should apply the updated by going to Tools -> Android -> Android SDK Manager.

I went there and there were three updates recommended, I clicked on apply and after that when i tried to run emulator, it started giving below error:

"hardware virtualization is not enabled on this computer and is required to use haxm. look at the reference material for your computer to find out if you can enable hardware virtualization. "

After googling this issue and reading through multiple contents online i fixed this problem by doing following steps: