New Xamarin Shared Project creation gives errors on Visual Studio 2015

Question

I have Visual Studio Enterprise 2015, with all updates and patches applied. When I build create a new Visual C# project Templates->Cross-Platform->Blank App (Xamarin.Forms Shared) I get the following error:

A problem was encountered creating the sub project '.Windows'. This project requires a Visual Studio update to load. Right-click on the project and choose 'Download Update'.

When I click Ok, a solution and projects are created but there is no .Windows, so I cant right click on it! If I try add the project then I get the same issue.

I would expect that such a simple use case should work out the box. I can find a few workarounds via Googling but I don't want to hack around with projects before I even write a line of code of my first Xamarin application.

Any ideas on what I need to do to get the project creation working properly "out of the box"?

A second puzzler is that the template creates a .WinPhone folder that is empty, should I have a csproj in it?

Answer 1

1. Close Visual Studio and try to modify it components (Control Panel -> Uninstall a program -> Microsoft Visual Studio -> click on it).
2. In opened window click on "Modify".
3. Then find and select "Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.0/8.1 Tools" (in Windows and Web Development)
4. Then click on "Update".

also make sure the Hyper-V is enabled :
Control Panel -> Uninstall a program, then in left menu "Turn Windows Features on or off" and find "Hyper-V", if it isn't selected, select it and click "ok".