Working on a Xamarin project for iOS from a Windows PC I ran into a situation where I could no longer debug the application. There had been no changes in source code from when I could debug to when I could not. A search for the error took me to other places where the problem had been discussed but not resolved. While I’ve been able to resolve the problem for myself, the other discussions were closed and I couldn’t place a resolution there. In the absence of another place to put this solution, I’m hosting it myself.

The more complete text of the error is as follows.

The application 'MyApplication' cannot be launched or debugged because it's not installed The app has been terminated.

Ofcourse, MyApplication would have the name of your application if you encounter this. While I don’t know what causes it, resolve it is a simple matter of erasing files. For my Xamrin project I’m using Visual Studio Community 2022 on a Windows Machine and communicating with an M1 Mac for compilation. On the M1, I had to navigate to the path $HOME/Library/Caches/Xamarin/mtbs/builds/ and erase the files and folders there. Returning to my solution on Windows, I got some other error about files not being found that was resolved by manually selecting dependency projects and recompiling those. After that, I was about to compile and debug the project like I could before.

I’m not sure what causes this error. I would have liked to have looked into it further. But delivery deadlines do not allow further examination. That said, there have been a few other low-frequency errors that I’ve encountered that are resolved by simply clearing this folder.

I hope that this solution is helpful to someone.

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