The referenced component 'Xamarin.Android.Support.v7.AppCompat' could not be found Xamarin.Android

Question

Every time I open my Xamarin.Android solution I am facing an issue with Xamarin.Android.Support.v7.AppCompat library.

Visual Studio gives me just warnings, and when I try to debug my solution Visual Studio hangs because of Xamarin.Android.Support.v7.AppCompat reference so I have to kill the process from task manager and reopen my solution again.

The only solution I found is to uninstall the library and reinstall it again every time I open my solution.

I am using windows 10, I've tried Visual Studio pro 2015, Visual Studio Enterprise 2015 and Visual Studio pro 2017 on other PC and it didn't help.

Xamarin.Android references

Answer 1

It was fixed after I updated the Xamarin.Build.Download to 0.4.3

Answer 2

Seems that this is a problem of the latest stable packages. I have updated the android support packages to v25.2.0-beta1 and Xamarin.Build.Download to v0.4.3-beta6. Now everything works fine and the warnings disappear. It might also work, if you update to a previous version.

The issue is also discussed in this thread: https://forums.xamarin.com/discussion/86702/upgrading-from-java-1-7-to-1-8-causes-javac-warning-unknown-enum-constant-scope-library-group

Answer 3

I had the exact same issue.

Couldn't find an answer and came across this question this morning. One of the comments gave me an idea.

Anyway, long story short, I deleted all the "missing" packages from the main packages directory (Solution Folder\packages) while VS is closed, and then reopen VS and the solution and it will automatically recreate the required packages fine.