Xcode is not correctly detected when opening iOS workbooks

[atsushieno]

I have Xcode 9.3 installed but Workbooks.app does not recognize it.

Steps to Reproduce

1. launch workbooks.app
2. open iOS workbook sample e.g. "learning iOS" sample linked from https://developer.xamarin.com/workbooks/

Expected Behavior

It just works.

Actual Behavior

Environment

Xamarin Workbooks

Detail	Value
Version	1.4.0
Git Branch	master
Git Hash	b3f92f9
VSTS Definition	Workbooks & Inspector (Mac)

System Info

Component	Value
macOS	Version 10.13.4 (Build 17E202) (64-bit)
CPU Cores	4 / 4
Physical Memory	16 GB

System-Installed Software

Component	Version
Mono	5.10.1.47
Xamarin Mac	4.4.1.173
Xamarin iOS	11.10.1.174
Xamarin Android	8.3.0-18
Visual Studio	7.5.0.1222 (705001222)

Log File

Xamarin Workbooks 2018-05-03.log

[sandyarmstrong]

Are you able to deploy Xamarin.iOS apps to your Xcode 9.3 simulator from VSmac?

We need to make sure this message gets surfaced better (it's in the log): Unable to locate a valid Xcode installation. Check the Apple SDK settings in Xamarin Studio preferences or ensure that xcode-select -p returns a valid Xcode installation path.

If you follow these instructions, are you able to get Workbooks (and VSmac, and Xamarin.iOS in general) to recognize it?

[atsushieno]

Yes, it just worked. (Also reran workbooks to verify that the problem still occurs.)

$ xcode-select -p
/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools

[sandyarmstrong]

Can you share your ~/Library/Preferences/Xamarin/Settings.plist?

My guess is that it does not have any xcode path in it, and that VSmac is actually checking the default path first, which we do not do.

So then, we look using xcode-select, but your xcode-select path seems very wrong, unless something has changed in Xcode 9.3 that I don't know about. You probably need to run sudo xcode-select -s /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer, at which point I expect Workbooks will find your Xcode just fine.

We should start checking /Applications/Xcode.app by default to emulate VSmac behavior.

[atsushieno]

It was, well, empty:

$ cat ~/Library/Preferences/Xamarin/Settings.plist 
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict/>
</plist>

Setting Xcode path by the xcode-select use above "fixed" the issue.

My Macbook is very fresh (started using last week) so I assume this is the default settings for not a few people.

[sandyarmstrong]

@atsushieno did you manually set your xcode-select path to /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools? If not, do you recall the steps you went through to set up Xcode, command line tools, etc on your machine? I'm very curious how that path got there.

But yes, we will fix Workbooks to also check the default installation path, like VSmac does, for those who don't have xcode-select configured properly.

[atsushieno]

I didn't run xcode-select on this machine before. My Xcode was installed from App Store - I can't think of anything that would overwrite the paths.

[sandyarmstrong]

Awesome, thanks for all the great info.

We'll get this fixed.