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Are there any plans by Microsoft to release a Taco Update 11 with native Cordova 7, Node 4.x support?
Is Taco still an active project since the last update was two years ago?

systempuntoout
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3 Answers3

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I think it is safe to assume Microsoft has abandoned TACO platform, putting their focus in this space to Xamarin.

  • As you pointed out, the last update to the tool was 2 years ago, Jan 2016.
  • The last entry in The Visual Studio Blog ("The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team") was 15 months ago, Oct 2016.
  • According to his LinkedIn profile, Jordan Matthiesen, who was Program Manager for VS Taco, is now Program Manager for Visual Studio For Mac.

For myself, a Visual Studio user for 27 years, I have switched to using Cordova CLI and Visual Studio Code on Mac.

mharr
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  • Returning from VS2015 to the CLI is not exactly moving forward, now you have to manually install plugins, platforms, compile, deploy, debug... all stuff that VS2015 does automatically with the click of a button. – andreszs Apr 17 '18 at 02:00
  • @andreszs That is true, from a VS user perspective (as I also am). But it still appears MS VS team has abandoned Cordova development, for the reasons I stated above. – mharr Apr 26 '18 at 18:37
  • And just a followup, reinforcing this view. Microsoft just rehomed their development blogs to new address, new layout. I was surprised to see a link for Apache Cordova under "popular tags", so I clicked on the link. Alas, the newest post is 2 1/2 years old (Aug 2016). – mharr Feb 16 '19 at 00:35
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After a few try i have found a way:

Follow this steps:

  1. install nodejs 4.8.7 on your machine

  2. in visual studio go under tools>options>"Tools for apache cordova" and deflag chekbox "use a sandboxed version of NodeJS"

  3. Edit taco.json file of your project and set "cordova-cli": "7.1.0"

  4. Open a new console and install cordova on your machine (npm install -g cordova@7.1.0)

For android build:

  1. open prompt, digit android and press return
  2. dovnload API 26 SDK from tool
  3. download gradle 2.x and put bin folder in your system path
  4. install jdk 1.8.x and set java_home system var to it reboot
Frix33
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  • Thanks this works, but VS2015 persists in using cordova-android 6.3.0, how can we force it to use at least cordova-android 7.0.0? – andreszs Apr 17 '18 at 01:58
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    Cordova@7.1.0 contains cordova-android@6.3.0, if you want to use more updated version you can use cordova@8.0.0, or you can try to set in your taco.json "cordova-android":"7.0.0" after "cordova-cli" version, if is compatible with CLI 7.1. Version of cordova and subplatform is not the same (es. cordova-ios is 4.3 on cordova@7.1.0, and the edge is cordova-ios 4.5). Hope it helps. – Frix33 Apr 17 '18 at 07:57
  • And keep care about compatibility issues with old plugins and android API version to install for build in major cordova-android versions. – Frix33 Apr 17 '18 at 08:04
  • You are right, Cordova 7.1.0 still uses cordova-android 6.3.0. Thanks! – andreszs Apr 19 '18 at 14:10
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For those that still use TACO for visual studio, I found the following instructions to update Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova for VS 2017 to use Cordova @7.1.0 and Cordova-Android @6.3.0

https://github.com/brunolau/vs-taco-update

It tells you how to find the old toolset (6.3.1) and how to replace it with a new version, and also how to update android to API level 26.

It also shows you how to create your own custom toolset, which I haven't tried, but sounds very useful.

Winks
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