When starting a new Cross Platform App with Xamarin.Forms you may find yourself needing to integrate the Active Directory Authentication Library (ADAL) with your Portable Class Library (PCL). This is most easily done using nuget.
The error
However, when doing this you may have encountered the following error:
Could not install package ‘Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory 3.13.9’. You are trying to install this package into a project that targets ‘.NETPortable,Version=v4.5,Profile=Profile259’, but the package does not contain any assembly references or content files that are compatible with that framework. For more information, contact the package author.
I’m using Visual Studio 2017 (VS2017) with Xamarin for Visual Studio 4.5. The Cross Platform App project template has it’s Target Framework Profile configured to Profile259 as stated in the error. This profile is an alias for the set of supported target frameworks. This profile doesn’t include Windows 10 Universal Windows Platform and does include Windows Phone 8 and 8.1 which are not supported. Profile7 represents a set of target platforms which is supported. The TargetFrameworkProfile can be seen by viewing csproj file in a text editor.
Changing the target frameworks
In order to change the set of target frameworks, right click the project, click Properties, then click Change... under Targeting.
Add Windows Universal 10.0. Adding support for UWP implicitly removes support for Windows Phone 8 and 8.1. If you don’t see Windows Universal 10.0 it may because you need to have Windows 10 installed.
Click OK. And you’ll see another error:
The resolution
In order to get around this, go back to the nuget package manager and uninstall all packages installed against the PCL project. In my scenario, this is only the Xamarin.Forms package. If you’ve got others because you are working from another template, uninstall those too, but remember to note them down as you’ll likely want to re-install them once the target framework profile has been changed.
You can now go back the project properties and successfully update the target framework profile. Note that after adding Windows Universal 10.0 it may look as though it has not been added. This appears to be a UI bug but as long as there are no errors it will have worked correctly. You can confirm this by checking the TargetFrameworkProfile in the csproj file.
Now that the target framework profile has been updated, the nuget packages which were uninstalled should now be re-installed and the ADAL library should successfully install as well.
Paul.