Xamarin Studio 5

In January we got a new free editor for F# when Microsoft announced that the new “Visual F# Tools 3.1.1” could be used with “Microsoft Visual Studio Express 2013 for Windows Desktop”. The newest “Visual F# Tools” is version 3.1.2.

Midyear Xamarin launched an F# t-shirt event (http://blog.xamarin.com/run-a-f-sharp-app-get-a-f-sharp-shirt/). The idea was to encourage trying out Xamarin Studio (or the Visual Studio integration) for free.

There is a bit of naming confusion going on at the Xamarin web site. Just look at the main download page, the title says “Xamarin Platfom”, the download button says “Xamarin for Windows” (in my case) and the file I get is called “Xamarin Studio”. On top of that I can’t run anything until I get “Xamarin Gtk#”.

I tried to install Xamarin Studio 5 to two different environments, and I tried running the installation with and without Visual Studio installed. In each case the installation failed with some error message or other.

Last month Christian Jacobsen posted a solution to the Xamarin Studio installation problem. The trick apparently is to install this quite old F# Tools 3.0. You know what? It worked! Thanks Christian.

For what it is worth, the software that I installed (in Hyper-V) was:

• Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64 bit (with service pack and updates)
• Chocolatey ver. 0.9.8.27
• F# Tools ver. 3.0
• F# Tools ver. 3.1.2
• Xamarin Gtk# for .Net ver. 2.12.25
• Xamarin Studio ver. 5.0.1

I am not trying to imply that all this software is necessary to run Xamarin Studio, and I am not suggesting that the mentioned versions are better than other versions either. If you already downloaded the Xamarin Studio installation package at some point you probably don’t need to do it again – once installed, when I opened up Xamarin Studio I was offered to update Xamarin Studio to a newer version (ver 5.5.0) by the built-in Xamarin Studio Updater which worked just fine.

A little more than a week ago, Monday October the 6th, Visual Studio 14 CTP 4 was released. Unfortunately I can’t install it. The installer, whether I use the downloaded iso file or the web installer, fails with a message that it can’t install Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5.3 Preview. I get the same error in Windows 7 (Hyper-V) as well as Windows 8 (native boot).

Robert Nielsen, 2014-oct-15.