visual studio 2017 (windows) not displaying all available ios simulator devices from mac

2
votes

I can't see all the available ios simulators available on my mac from my Visual Studio 2017 (windows) simulator list.

The simulator list on my windows machine using Visual Studio 2017 shows all the ios simulators from iphone 4s through iPhone 7 Plus. But it will not display anything higher, like iPhone 8 or iPhone X. I do have iOS SDK version 8.1 - 12 installed on my mac and all simulators have "Show as run destination" checked. But no matter what I do, I can't get the list of iOS simulators to show anything above iPhone 7. I have rebooted both windows and mac machines multiple times, I have no problem pairing to the MAC machine from my windows machine with Visual Studio on Windows. I even went through the hassle of re-creating my developer certificate and profile/provisions with apple to make sure that wasn't the issue and imported the provision stuff into Xcode.

This is for a Xamarin Forms app.

This is driving me crazy since I can't test on iphone 8, iPhone X or higher.

All software is up-to-date. I have the latest Visual Studio 2017 (for windows) and Xcode.

  • Visual Studio 2017 version 15.5.8 (Windows)
  • Xcode 10.0 (10A255)
  • Xamarin Forms 2.5 (not the latest version, but shouldn't have to be)
1
iosxcodevisual-studio

1 Answers

3
votes

I had this same issue. I've come to the conclusion that the Visual Studio IDE is only capable of displaying a certain maximum number of simulators. So I was able to resolve the issue by deleting some of the oldest simulators I had (i.e. some iPhone 4 and 5 simulators).

To delete a simulator, launch XCode on the connected Mac and on the menu, select Window > Devices and Simulators, then click on Simulators in the resulting window. From the simulators list, you can right-click and select Delete to remove one. Unfortunately you can't multi-select so you have to delete one at a time.

After deleting some, restart Visual Studio on the Windows side. When I did this, the newer simulators that had been previously missing were listed.