Hot Restart not working in VS 2026

[borrmann]

Hot Restart was amazing. Best way to quickly test UI on physical devices. Much faster than android and a lot more reliable than using Mac host in my experience..
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/maui/ios/hot-restart?view=net-maui-10.0

Seemed like it was very stable and hadn't been broken for me in a long time..
Does any one know why it was removed from VS 2026?

[jaimeatsherpa]

That's a real good point... Im also using Hot Restart and found it pretty useful. That's mainly why Im still on VS 2022 and will not update to 2026 for a while. It also gives me the possibility to test the app on a real device for things like the camera, wifi, bluetooth etc... I would love to have it back in VS 2026

[asi-evin]

I also enjoyed the feature. It meant I could do some work from home without hauling the Mac from the office.

[thedee]

It was Xamarin and Maui’s best feature and they removed it from VS 2026. Why?

[albyrock87]

Starting from the next SR, .net MAUI Will ship with its own XCFramework for a better platform interop.

Building with XCFramework has never been supported in HotRestart due to the fact that some build tools are only available on MacOS.

[Lucasian20]

Does anyone know why hot restart has been dropped I'm guessing Apple has made a change to stop this

[acaliaro]

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/max-lock_net-maui-hot-restart-for-ios-device-deployment-activity-7414184382388903937-3Wvx?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAF-oyABkMyZKyfuMCTvFJFgLRMGWYELRD8

[borrmann]

Its not because of apple. Its because MAUI is starting to use XCFramework, which requires build tools that are only available on MAC (see the response that is marked as answer)

[albyrock87]

So I've done some research, and apparently HotRestart could still be a thing even with the new XCFramework MAUI uses though it'd be a bit of a challenge.

HotRestart basically uses a pre-built apple binary and then simply places the .NET stuff in a data directory of the app so that it gets picked up at runtime.

So in theory, the XCFramework could be pre-included in such a package.

Now the problem lies in the fact that MAUI could potentially evolve that XCFramework on every release so it'd be a bit of a nightmare to create this package for every SR and then have you basically download this with the workload and have HotRestart pick it up from there.

HotRestart still need to re-sign the final package with your certificate, and afaik it has been achieved by reverse engineering Apple's signing mechanism.

So I think it could still be possible but it's a bit of a nightmare to be handled.

And anyway, all this starts from the fact that Apple wants you to buy their devices so they're not providing build tools for other OS like Windows.

[densen2014]

That's really ridiculous. I've been using this feature, and after deleting VS2022 and installing VS2026 the day before yesterday, I couldn't find it anymore. I thought it was a driver issue, but it turns out it was removed...