Using Boots to Update Xamarin SDKs in shared CI machines.

Environment

Product Version	Any
Product	UI for Xamarin
System	AppCenter, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions or GitLab CI

Outdated Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android

There are times in the development life-cycle where AppCenter, GitHub Actions or Azure DevOps build machines will have an outdated Xamarin.iOS or Xamarin.Android SDK installed that causes a build failure.

Boots

The solution is to use Boots. Boots is a tool makes it very easy to install a specific SDK that you need.

It's most common use is to install the latest version on an outdated public build agent. Here's the commands to install boots and then install any SDK you need

# install boots
dotnet tool install --global boots

# Update Xamarin.iOS SDK to the latest stable release
boots --stable Xamarin.iOS

# Update Xamarin.Android to the latest stable release
boots --stable Xamarin.Android

You can learn more about how to use boots, including how to install preview and custom SDKs here https://github.com/jonathanpeppers/boots