VS2015 Build agent request has failed, URI not set

Question

I am a relatively long time Xamarin.iOS user, and normally I am able to use my Xamarin Build Host from Visual Studio 2012. I recently setup a new Windows 8.1 machine with VS2015 connected to my Xamarin account and the build host connection pairing seems to work fine, but as soon as I compile an (iOS) project from Visual Studio I get the following compile error:

Build agent request has failed, URI not set, please see the inner exception for details.

Hint: there is no inner exception.

The Visual Studio solution I am using is just boilerplate stuff from using project templates, as my goal is to spike out the new C++ Cross Platform project support in VS2015. Here's what I've done:

1. Create a new Project, Visual C#, Mobile Apps, Blank App (Xamarin.Forms Portable).
2. In the generated solution, Add new project, Other Languages, Visual C++, Cross Platform, Static Library (iOS), named CppStaticIos.
3. Attempt to build CppStaticIos, and the error will present itself.
4. Attempting to build the .iOS version of the C# application will compile and run in the simulator on my build host.

My Windows 8 Firewall seems to be allowing everything VS2015, and Xamarin Bonjour Service. I double-checked that both the host and client machines have the latest stable Xamarin updates installed.

Answer 1

I was wrong to think I can use a built-in VS2015 project template for Static Library (iOS), hit build and assuming my Xamarin build host is setup, that it would work. There is actually a couple of extra steps, you probably wouldn't know unless you were using a guide, because there are also remote VS tools which need to be installed on the build host (Mac). Here are two helpful guide sections in particular:

• Install tools for iOS
• Configure the remote agent for iOS in Visual Studio

Even still there were a few quirks to get this running. Mostly due to the most recent version of npm will fail to install vcremote. Here's what I did:

• brew install node assuming you have homebrew installed and want to install node this way
• npm install -g npm@2.6.0 forcing to use npm 2.6.0 in order to install vcremote
• npm install -g vcremote

Then you should be able to run vcremote (taking note of host name and pin) and continue to setup your Visual Studio settings before building. The C++ static library for iOS will build and appear to complete on the Visual studio side. On the build host, under your project output inside your remote root path (set in VS options) your compiled library should exist there. One thing that pains me is that the final build output is not copied back to the output directory for the project on the Windows machine. If VS offers a way to reference this library to the application project and do some automatic resolution of binary dependencies then this won't be any kind of issue.