Xamarin Add-ins Aren't working, cannot see lis

Question

I'm just getting started with CocosSharp in Xamarin Studio on Mac. I'm trying to follow this walk-through.

https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/cross-platform/game_development/cocossharp/first_game/part1/

The first step in the Walk-through is to open up Xamarin Studio, and install the CocosSharp add-in.

"If running on a Mac, select Xamarin Studio > Add-in Manager...Click the Gallery tab, expand the CocosSharp item, select CocosSharp project templates, and finally click Install... ."

When I do that I get an error message like this...

Could not get information from repository: http://addins.monodevelop.com/Stable/Mac/6.1.4/main.mrep.

Exception occurred: The remote server returned an error: (404) Not Found.

System.Net.WebException: The remote server returned an error: (404) Not Found. at System.Net.HttpWebRequest.EndGetResponse (System.IAsyncResult asyncResult) [0x00065] in /private/tmp/source-mono-4.6.0/bockbuild-mono-4.6.0-branch/profiles/mono-mac-xamarin/build-root/mono-x86/mcs/class/System/System.Net/HttpWebRequest.cs:1025 at System.Net.HttpWebRequest.GetResponse () [0x0000e] in /private/tmp/source-mono-4.6.0/bockbuild-mono-4.6.0-branch/profiles/mono-mac-xamarin/build-root/mono-x86/mcs/class/System/System.Net/HttpWebRequest.cs:1037 at MonoDevelop.Core.Web.RequestHelper.GetResponse (System.Threading.CancellationToken token) [0x0008d] in /Users/builder/data/lanes/3509/e606823f/source/monodevelop/main/src/core/MonoDevelop.Core/MonoDevelop.Core.Web/RequestHelper.cs:194

I've tried restarting Xamarin Studio, I've tried restarting my entire computer and I've tried changing every options that I can think of in the Add-In Manager to show something and I get the error every time. I've tried selecting "All Add-in's" only "Alpha Add-In's", "Beta Add-Ins" etc and can not get any add-ins list to show up at all.

Is there a chance that the repository site is truly down or is it possible that I am not doing something right or do I need to re-install Xamarin Studio or something? Has anyone else experienced anything like this? I'm really excited to get started with CocosSharp but I'm not even able to get the components installed to give it a try.

I also tried installing a NuGet package of CocosSharp and was able to add the NuGet package to a single view iOS App, but that is drastically different than the approach in the walk-through and then I can't really use much of the walkthrough to help me learn how to implement it.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Answer 1

It appears that there are known issues with the latest repository directory url.

On January 13, 2017 MattWard mentions a work around in the Xamarin forums. He recommends manually adding the older repository...

http://addins.monodevelop.com/Stable/Mac/6.1/main.mrep

The forum post can be seen here.

https://forums.xamarin.com/discussion/comment/245731#Comment_245731

I tried that and I was able to get a list of Add-Ins. Here is a screenshot of what that looked like on my computer.

In my case it doesn't really help because I later found out that the CocosSharp templates no longer work. I have found posts as early as August of 2016 that state that you can no longer download the CocosSharp templates for Xamarin Studio because they won't work at all with the newer versions of Xamarin Studio. Hopefully they will have new templates in the future.

The general advice is to download a project off of their GitHub site...

https://github.com/mono/CocosSharp

Samples can be found here...

https://github.com/mono/cocos-sharp-samples

... then modify those projects as a starting point for your own project.

It is really disappointing for me that as I'm trying to get started in CocosSharp I am finding walkthroughs that can't be walked through and to be pointed towards templates that don't exist... but, whatever... this is the way that it is currently.