Failed Build in Visual Studio Team Services after Xamarin upgrade

This week I updated Visual Studio’s version of Xamarin. All was well until I kicked off a build for my Andriod project in Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS). During the Build Xamarin.Android Project step I recieved the following error and my build failed:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jdk1.6.0_45\\bin\javac.exe -J-Dfile.encoding=UTF8 -d obj\Release\android\bin\classes -classpath ....
obj\Release\android\src\android\support\design\R.java:10: cannot access java.lang.Object
bad class file: java\lang\Object.class(java\lang:Object.class)
class file has wrong version 52.0, should be 50.0
Please remove or make sure it appears in the correct subdirectory of the classpath.
 public final class R {

The interesting part in the error message was the class file has wrong version 52.0, should be 50.0 message. This was ultimately what helped me find the error.

After a few minutes of searching, it was obvious that I had the wrong JDK version for building my assembly. Most of the issues were Android Studio specific but I found an issue were this happened in Visual Studio. This wasn’t Visual Studio, instead VSTS but it got me down the right path.

Fix - Setting the Build Version explicitly in Build.Andriod step

Now that I had some idea of what was going on, I headed over to my VSTS Build process and noticed that there was an option in the Build Xamarin.Android step to set the JDK Version. Looking at the output above I noticed I was using JDK 6. I tried JDK 7 and got the message Unsupported major.minor version 52.0. So I tried the only value left which was JDK 8 and it worked. Here is the screen shot of the updated setting:

update jdk version number in vsts

I assume that there is a good explanation for the change but I have not found it yet. Hope this helps!

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