Thursday, July 11, 2013

Xamarin 2.0 activation sucks

I love the Xamarin 2.0 improvements that arrived this year.

I now sit there on my PC and deploy to 5 operating systems and to websites from a single solution.

It's fabulous!

However...

I've had a lot of problems with Xamarin activation during the last 6 months. To put it bluntly, it's flakey and it's cost me weeks of wasted time.

It seems to randomly decide that I need to reactivate my software - at which point it refuses to work until it can connect to some bit of Xamarin's servers... and even then it often fails...

For example, this morning on the train I was trying to do some work...

Only, up came this window...



But I'm on the train... and I can't get on the Internet...

So I have to hit cancel...



... so Xamarin simply says "No, you can't work now" - it won't even let me open the project.




... which gives me the rest of the train journey to draft this blog post...

8 comments:

  1. I Agree so much. Last friday, I got a new mac and installed Xamarin. I tried to activated a Trial version while I get my license sorted and it refused to activate. I tried again and again but without luck.

    I contacted Xamarin support, he asked me to try offline support. Imagine I had to inform him that offline support is not supported for Trial activations while he argued it can be done.

    I left it at that.

    Monday morning, i dreaded the activation screen, but imagine my surprise when it activated on the first try without any glitches.

    When I replied to the support guy, he informed me that they had run of trial activations on friday and thus the issue :O

    They really need to fix this.

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  2. Yikes! Haven't had any trouble yet *knock on wood*. I really hope they get this sorted out before I do.

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  3. I also started having license activation issues just a few hours ago, so perhaps there is an issue on Xamarin's end?

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  4. Stuart - I apologize for the inconvenience. Once activated, your software SHOULD keep working forever. We do not require an internet connection to use Xamarin. This issue you found is a bug in our VS activation code which we were finally were able to track down today. It's as frustrating to me as it is to you that this kept cropping up.

    Mohib - Sorry to hear about your experience. We're in the middle of a major project to overhaul our activation system and make it much more reliable. That should kill these issues dead!

    Nat Friedman
    CEO, Xamarin

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    Replies
    1. Thanks Nat

      Very much look forwards to trying the fix out. I may have been more vocal than most (now there's a surprise!), but I have seen and heard a lot of people expressing a lot of frustration over activation - so I hope this fix works and helps Xamarin grow to even more success :)

      Heading back to work :)

      Stuart

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    2. Good to hear that Nat. Looking forward to the fixes. :)

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  5. I love Xamarin - but constantly run into activation issues (I suppose I shouldn't use the alpha...)

    It's a real shame as given it's an enterprise solution they probably shouldn't be so worried about this kind of thing. Enterprises normally have no problem paying for software that saves time.
    Wasting time with activation however is just crazy.

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  6. everytime when i loggin using xamarin studio i have issue like this.
    "unhandled activation error"
    System.Exception: Could not load machine data: monodroid: missing -sdk-dir=DIRECTORY.
    at Xamarin.Components.Ide.Activation.ActivationService.GetErrorWorkflow(LicenseSyncResult[] results, Boolean ignoreSyncErrors)
    at Xamarin.Components.Ide.Activation.ActivationService.d__88.MoveNext()
    at Xamarin.Components.Ide.Activation.ActivationDialog.DisplayWorkflowStep(ActivationWorkflowStep step)
    at Xamarin.Components.Ide.Activation.ActivationDialog.<>c__DisplayClass13.b__12(Task t).
    i using windows 7, 32bit
    xamarin 3.11.666
    xamarin studio 5.9.4.5
    xamarin android player 0.4.4.
    xamarin installer 3.5.0
    how to fix it.i hope somebody help me.....

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