Xamarin IOs, Private key is encrypted but passphrase is empty when connecting to Mac Build Agent from Visual Studio for Windows

Question

I am using a Mac with Parallels Desktop installed to build my Xamarin.IOs app in Visual Studio for Windows 2017 (Professional). I have two windows accounts in the Windows that runs in Parallels Desktop.

I used Visual Studio in one windows account and successfully connected to the Mac Build agent. But when I switched back to the other windows account and used the same Visual Studio application, I get an error when connecting to the Mac Build agent saying,

Private key is encrypted but passphrase is empty...

How can I fix this?

Answer 1

It seems like this is a bug in Visual Studio 2017.

I had to delete the,

• id_rsa
• id_rsa.pub
• passphrase.key

files found in my Windows account at %LOCALAPPDATA%\\Xamarin\\MonoTouch and reconnect to the Mac Build Agent.

Then it started working fine 😊

NOTE : I found this solution from here