VS 2013 Android Designer Issues

Question

User31244 posted

I'm having the following issues with the Android Designer within VS 2013. - The Content/Source buttons do not show - The "Alternative Layouts" button doesn't work when I first open a axml file in the designer. Hiding then reshowing the Toolbox causes it to begin working

The problem appears limited to VS, as I'm able to use XS without these issues.

I'm running in the following environment Windows 7 Pro VS 2013 Ultimate Xamarin Android 4.10.01073

Answer 1

User31244 posted

I just realized that there appears to be additional issue with the VS designer: The string resources aren't expanding in the designer

• In the attached screenshot, the button text displays as @string/Hello rather than the resource value

It works correctly in XS

Answer 2

User31244 posted

I installed the 4.10.2 Beta and that addressed my 2 main issues

• Now have Content/Source buttons in designer (listed as a feature in 4.10.2)
• The "Alternative Layouts" button now appears to work correctly

Still have the issue where the resources strings don't expand in the designer (as they do in XS) but I can live with that.

Answer 3

User25759 posted

So for the resource strings you will need to lower case all of the folders under "Resources" (ie: Layouts, Values, Drawables) and this should fix it up. This bug is already in bugzilla and should be fixed soon.

Answer 4

User31244 posted

Thanks James, it worked perfectly. I switched the resource folder names to lower case and now the string resources are expanding properly. Thanks!

Answer 5

User31244 posted

The Xamarin.Android 4.10.2 beta installation is breaking iOS in Visual Studio. It's a beta so I know I'm living on the edge... just letting you know it happened :-).

I confirmed it is the beta that broke things by completely uninstalling all of Xamarin, did the standard install, created iOS and Android projects in VS w/ no trouble. Then installed the 4.10.2 beta and verify that iOS is now broken.

The problem is that when I try to view the Xamarin iOS values in the Options dialog or try to access/create an iOS project I get the error message "The 'MonoTouchPackage' package did not load correctly".

I checked the Visual Studio ActivityLog.xml and it contains the error

• SetSite failed for package [MonoTouchPackage]

Answer 6

User25759 posted

Thanks Jim, please make sure you report these in http://bugzilla.xamarin.com so the dev team can look at them.

Answer 7

User31244 posted

I posted the bug https://bugzilla.xamarin.com/show_bug.cgi?id=16668

Just an FYI. I had to file it under version 4.10.1 as the bug tracker didn't make 4.10.2 available as an option.