title: intercept web traffic from visual studio xamarin for mac / iOS simulator
body: <p>I know almost nothing about Visual Studio or Xamarin. I'm using Visual Studio for Mac 8.9.10. This isn't my code and I'm trying to understand it.</p>
  <p>This app does REST requests to my server (rails) and I am trying to intercept them. I have my iOS Simulator set up so that network requests can pass thru Proxyman. This works fine for, say, Mobile Safari on the Simulator, or for an app that I write myself in Xcode. I thus believe I have a good handle on Proxyman usage and on the traffic I am trying to intercept.</p>
  <p>However, when my app built from Visual Studio Xamarin does networking in the Simulator, nothing appears in Proxyman. I thought at first this might be because of my use of a localhost server for testing, but it is equally true for normal requests that really do go out on the Internet. Proxyman doesn't seem to see my app's traffic at all.</p>
  <p>This makes me think there is something odd about the way Visual Studio / Xamarin itself configures iOS apps for networking. Is there? How do Mac users intercept web traffic from a Xamarin Visual Studio-built iOS app in the Simulator?</p>
  <p>(And another thing: If I write my own iOS app to be intercepted by Proxyman, I have to enable NSArbitraryLoads in order to talk via http. But my Visual Studio Xamarin app doesn't have that in the Info.plist; yet it can talk via http. How can that be? Seems related.)</p>
  <p>(This might be related: it seems Xamarin http requests really do evade the proxy somehow? <a href="https://forums.xamarin.com/discussion/129748/how-do-i-make-http-requests-using-proxy-settings" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://forums.xamarin.com/discussion/129748/how-do-i-make-http-requests-using-proxy-settings</a>)</p>