Is it required to have a Xamarin account in order to build Xamarin projects in VS 2017

Question

Is it really needed to log in with an Xamarin account in order to build Xamarin projects? The answer seems clearly to be YES, but I might have overlooked something.

I hit build in a solution with a few Xamarin projects resulting in this login dialog with the message Please log in to use Xamarin:

If I press Cancel then the output states the following:

1>------ Build started: Project: MyProject, Configuration: Debug Any CPU ------
Build has been canceled.

This was not an requirement in Visual Studio 2015. Not all of my fellow colleagues cares for the Xamarin projects, so I would hate to force them to create an Xamarin account, just to be able to build our solution. Having an extra solution without the Xamarin projects would solve it but I would hate to have two solutions to keep up-to-date.

I have connected Visual Studio to my MSA that has a valid MSDN Enterprise subscription so it should not be a licensing issue.

Answer 1

TL;DR : You're SOL, you've got to create an account.

Yes. I'm pretty sure you're not allowed to use xamarin without any license.

But creating an account automatically makes you subscribe to the Free license which allows you to do what you want (here, build).

So it's only a one time thing, creating an account and logging in with it. Later you would be able to upgrade to entreprise if needed, but that is not relevant right now.