Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
weblogs.asp.net
weblogs.asp.net
I think there is huge synergy [1] to be exploited by combining Xamarin's team with language/compiler design/visual studio team. I think MS is extremely well positioned to be a leading development platform across desktop/web/mobile in the enterprise space with this acquisition.
[1] Never thought I would ever use that word in a comment.
That's all I know that Xamarin makes, so I think this article is going a bit over my head, but it'll be a shame if I suddenly need a Microsoft account to use it. I do like diversity in my language tooling.
Xamarin Studio is a swiss army knife. I don't know about your use case, but I use it under the name Monodevelop on linux (not really sure what that association is) and as Xamarin studio on windows. For my use case, it's a C# and C++ IDE for desktop development, same as visual studio.
It's certainly not a MacOS only product, it supports all three platforms including windows.
Mono only supports a subset of the whole stack.
No sane .NET developer would use Mono on Windows, its purpose is .NET portability to other OSes.
WHY ARE WE ARGUING?
explodes
Poor guy. His name autocorrects to one of the best-known names in computing.
Last I checked, that was just a forked and rebranded Mono Develop with Xamarin's main product line (iOS and Android support for .NET) bundled in.
Extend with proprietary functionality
Extinguish the competition
The competition for .Net isn't Xamarin. It's the Java platform.
Several years before that purchase, Stephen Elop (an MS executive) became CEO of Nokia. Within 6 months of his hire, Nokia signed an agreement with MS to sell Windows Phone devices; the classic Symbian OS and the Linux-based Meego - both of which had shipping hardware - were canceled in favor of exclusive focus on Windows Phone. Within the next few years, Nokia laid off over 20k people, their stock dropped by about 85%, and they even sold and then leased back their HQ in Finland. They were a lot less successful by that point, and a lot less expensive to purchase. Which Microsoft did.
There was some amount of controversy associated with the above.
Can't see why. It's obvious Microsoft perfected executive outplacement as an offensive weapon.
Although technically MeeGo had no shipping hardware at the time. The N900 ran Maemo, the first (and sadly only) MeeGo hardware to ship to the public was the N9 which didn't ship until months after the "burning platform" announcement
MS licensed their patents, but the current profitable Nokia kept them and has a unit dedicated to research and IP.
One can argue that the licensing was cheap, but cross-licensing agreements between companies is very common.
Disclaimer: I have been one of the ones pushing the last 5 years to make that statement true. ;)
Is it even possible for you guys to kill the undead SCO monster now? At any rate, it's still working away.
I expect it's done things you (and me) don't like in the past 15 years. However, the same goes for Apple, Google, IBM and Oracle. Microsoft hasn't been the least ethical of that lot.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-c...
Noticed how this date is withing those 5 year of "It's a whole new Microsoft" mantra you guys chanting over and over?
There could be many ways to undo the good things MS has done recently, and they are not perfect, but I am much happier the direction in the past year than I have been since the start of the company.
I would argue that Winforms is now a mature technology and requires little upkeep, but it is still a part of the stack.
WPF development has slowed significantly, but still proceeds.
Also, both the JavaScript language and runtime were pretty hard to build reliable, performant apps in back when Silverlight was introduced. The JavaScript language and runtimes have matured considerably since then.
If it had been my say, I'd have kept it for a little longer than they did, but by now I'd say it's no longer necessary.
There were always two camps in the Silverlight world, both inside and outside of Microsoft: those that saw it as a way to make browser-based applications more awesome, and those that saw Silverlight as a way to get away from that yucky HTML/CSS/JS dev. I was always firmly in the first camp, and from that side of things I wouldn't take back a minute I spent on Silverlight dev - I got a jump on video, vector graphics, browser-based apps, etc., long before it was practical to do that in the browser. When those technologies hit mainstream browsers, great!
Note: Microsoft employee but definitely only speaking for myself here.
It's hard to trust that the currently good sides of MS will be allowed to stay good while other sides of MS are still behaving badly.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11167964
I'm sure there are Officially no privacy implications here.
This news is important because it solidifies the future of the .Net ecosystem in iOS, OSX, Android, Linux and Windows.
The Xamarin team has been doing a great job, but I am pretty sure that with Microsoft backing them they'll do a way better job.
I am very much hoping that both of these issues are addressed with this acquisition, and like many, I have been holding out for a while now hoping this would happen.
EDIT: pjmlp, can't reply to your comment directly: You are talking about the Indie edition, with which you cannot use Visual Studio. Using Visual Studio requires the professional edition, at $999/platform/year. Even with the discount they gave me, the thousands of dollars I spent just to do hobby projects was a mistake.
I just abandoned it for Ionic after pitching the product to my peers for two years.
Let's just hope that MSFT indeed add it to Visual Studio without any additional costs.
You either die a developer or live long enough to see yourself become the manager?
I inherited a Xamarin app on one project - and while there were certainly some issues here and there, the promise of native cross-platform app development and shared C# libraries is pretty compelling.
I said a few years ago that this should happen, so glad to see it actually come to pass! http://tmarman.com/Blog/Post/ba9a711f-dcdb-40b5-bca9-ad6eb5b...
Congrats!
Back when MS broadcasted OSX/nix compatibility for Visual Studio I felt it necessary to comment that .NET development has been supported in OSX/nix for over a decade.
In short, Miguel De Icaza should be awarded a medal from MS for his heroic effort in developing the Mono platform and tooling; in spite of the constant threat of legal action from Microsoft for 'patent infringement' of their supposedly 'open' (ie ECMA) standard languages and VM.
Hopefully, he finally receives public recognition and reward for all his hard work.
That doesn't mean Microsoft would never sue them or their users. If a Fortune 500 company using Mono receives a letter from Microsoft, they'll act exactly the same as any Android manufacturer that received similar letters.
Which is why I'm inclined to think of it as FUD-spreading. It's not about a balanced assessment of the strategic risks involved in using a particular open source product so much as it's about how one company in particular has been mythologized into something approaching a Lovecraftian horror in the minds of many members of a particular subculture.
Luckily, we will be joining a new Microsoft (pending regulatory approval), one lead by Satya which has a different vision for the company. We are excited about what this means for Xamarin's products, for our customers, for our users, for our employees, but most of all, we are excited about what we can achieve inside Microsoft for all of Microsoft's customers, and the rapidly growing open source community around .NET.
Cheers! Miguel
Hopefully, the regulatory approval stuff works out without issue.
Microsoft needs better representation in OSS and I can't think of anybody better equipped to assist them in that direction.
...
>>> egularly used Mac OS X instead of Linux for desktop computing
Haven't heard of him before, seems like he's choosing being pragmatic over being philosophically right. I like this :)
Also, I'm personally not happy about this. I think people on HN should know better. Besides a couple of black swans being the exceptions that confirm the rule, acquisitions is how projects die. This is because acquisitions are either defensive or acquihires. And even when done out of a genuine desire for progress, big companies end up choking these acquisitions to death, after all they weren't capable of such progress in-house, with the project members moving on after one or two years when their contract expires.
But hey, people were excited about Nokia as well.
Binding APIs are some work but not impossible for OSS community to replicate if the CoreCLR and friends provided a portable platform with liberal licensing - so even if Xamarin disappeared it could be replicated - but I see no reason for them to shut it down.
And the third part of Xamarin is tooling which they can roll up into their own product offering.
Basically acquihire is a good scenario in this case because Microsoft is already moving towards these areas, Xamarin brings in talent and a bridge with working tech to provide transition.
i think it's confirmation bias you don't really think of all the many successful acquisitions only the bad ones stand out.
"OneNote started as an email exchange between myself and Steven Sinofsky, the Senior VP for Office, Nov 27, 2000."
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/chris_pratley/archive/2004/01/30/one...
That said, the core and infrastructure and all the stuff that makes it run is still a radioactive COM wasteland, and from experience trying to write an extension once, you can tell..
(Some sarcasm intended)
The other devs are still using a better terminal editor.
As a personal anecdote, I did give VSC a try when I had to write some TypeScript. Installed a couple of plugins for Neovim and I was both at home (which means, more productive) and still had the same functionality I used in VSC.
Mobile OK but Linux? Currently on the HN frontpage theres an article about how Skype for Linux hasn't been updated for years and "is unable to join calls": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11165568
Microsoft is so far from having the capability of doing any of those things. Any company that has a monopoly starts acting evil, but Microsoft is no longer close to having monopoly.
They don't want end users to run Linux desktop.
So devtools/languages/cloud divisions inside Microsoft like Linux.
Those in ms who deal with end user applications (home users in this case, as ms push Lync to business) probably see little point in investing in development in Skype for Linux.
I think it can become the best alternative to the javascript world, which already can target all these, but needs all kinds of native support and is much less solid as a language.
Ugh no. Professionally, I would have a lot to gain from that as a developer but in general that would be an awful turn of events. Long term it would be a net negative for the world and we all should know better by now.
The rumor was Miguel told MS to "F*#K Off" when MS presented him with an offer many years ago. This lead to CoreCLR being open sourced and Visual Studio Code being built.
I'd like to know if by undermining parts of Xamarins business they were able to get them at substantial discount - especially with the tech industry downturn. Or if failure in the Windows Phone market has made MS desperate and forced their hand. Given it's undisclosed I'm guessing it's the former. I'd like to know if telling MS to "F#&K Off" was a good strategy :)
The rumor sounds bogus. MS has been collaborating with Xamarin (and it's previous incarnation) for almost a decade.
Besides, even if the price was public, one could read anything it wants it that. "Oh the number is low because MS undermined them".
From what I've seen, the numbers for those companies like Xamarin are always much much lower that BS inflated unicorns with no actual business models...
And there's another thing: for what Xamarin offers (which is in the mobile space, with their support for iOS/Android APIs etc), the open source CLR and the VS Code, the basis for the rumor, don't even figure at all. Nobody that used Xamarin will gonna turn to those products, because they simply don't do the same thing at all.
What is it you think those to products are? They aren't trying to reproduce anything Xamarin does.
CoreCLR is part of Microsoft's "cloudy" strategy, they want to be on Linux micro-instances, and on Windows Server Nano. Visual Studio Code is just the absolutely minimum Microsoft has to do to make CoreCLR seem "real" on other platforms (a 101 UI).
Honestly the whole .Net open sourcing/porting thing is a lot older than this cross-platform interest and while the two are aligned right now I highly doubt that's what kicked it off.
Acquiring Xamarin is just acknowledging that Windows Phone is DOA and their best shot at monetizing the mobile world is providing backend hosting/services and developer tools. That's not a secret - that's their publicly announced strategy.
I'd expect all the Xamarin tools to be built-in to VS going forward. One VS/MSDN subscription gets you everything and the tools will make it trivially easy to host on Azure.
I'd almost be surprised if there were previous formal offers as I'm pretty sure the discussions between Miguel and various MS folks, especially Scott Gu, were frank, open, and mostly trusting. You don't throw out formal offers if you have Xamarin openly talking through why they don't feel the time is right.
My take is Miguel and Nat have always been "do right by the technology first." They danced the line with mono and old MS. They then made a compelling step towards where MS would head a few years prior to MS being able to start showing progress in that direction.
As a CoreCLR contributor, my impression was always that the mono-team was extremely happy about .NET official going open-source and how that made it possible to align the two code-bases in a much better fashion.
I don't think I've ever seen CoreCLR portrayed as an effort to "undermine" Xamarin or mono. Rather I'd take it as an imitation, the ultimate form of complement.
Where did you get/form that picture?
You can see it right here in this thread: as another commenter said, not that long ago this news would've prompted universal predictions of doom, whereas now people seem thrilled. Timing is everything.
RoboVM was acquired by Xamarin in Oct. 2015 (https://xamarin.com/pr/xamarin-acquires-robovm)
It was a lot of hard work and dedication and, above all, constant shipping. Good for them.
Also, in the spirit of giving. I have released an open source version of a game in Xamarin.Forms and CocosSharp. It's a These Crazy Walls Clone.
https://github.com/jonedavis/Xamarin.Forms-With-Cocosharp
Hope someone finds it useful!
One thing I'm really looking forward to is efforts on the QA front. I'm scared to update every time as things are frequently broken, especially on the iOS side.
I'm looking forward to the day where I can ditch C++ for portability - .NET really is an ideal replacement for most apps - you can write apps that don't stress the GC by using value types and can control memory layouts relatively well (unlike Java) and at the same time you can use reflection, GC and all the niceties of modern programming platforms - unlike C++.
You can compile .NET code to JavaScript using JSIL:
Do you know about any bigger projects using JSIL ?
If you're looking for asm.js/wasm support in particular, you may be interested in LLILC, which appears to be a .NET Core to LLVM IR compiler, meaning you could make use of Emscripten to convert the code to asm.js:
IIRC LLILC is ways off from actually being usable as a static compiler and you'll still have to figure out how to ship a runtime and do GC in asm.js (realistically can't) and not to mention it's single threaded so it's a question if you can even get CoreCLR to run in such enviroment without heavy modifications.
It would be huge if we could just write everything in C# (frontend/lib and backend) but I don't see this realistically being possible for at least two years given the development pace of webasm.
Or pay for DuoCode http://duoco.de/buy or SharpKit http://sharpkit.net/Licensing.aspx (both also available under copyleft-ish licensing).
I meant it in .NET context.
Satya Nadella is a breath of fresh air. I don't say that very often about top-level management (not that my opinion is all that important), I suspect if I was employed by Microsoft I'd feel proud of working there.
for the issue in uservoice 2700votes ATM:https://xamarin.uservoice.com/forums/234640-xamarin-suggesti...
1) addressing the price-point, 2) core clr integration, 3) retaining the top engineering talent at Xamarin, 4) addressing the iOS designer-specific issues
A couple notes:
For most LOB apps, I'm not convinced the code re-use is significant. The bulk of work is in the interface and navigation which is, necessarily, handled by coding android / ios specifics. Despite noble effort, the iOS design essentially needs to be done in xcode (point 4 above).
The build/release process is and (presumably) always will be locked behind the gates of technology's North Korea (Apple). They can throw a switch and restrict 3rd party runtimes if and when they choose.
For businesses in the 5-100 million range, writing an expense app in 2017, MSDN Xamarin should be a logical choice - but it has to be a platform with the reliability of .NET and a simple cross-platform designer. For app-centric startups, games, POS systems, etc. - it's probably a bad move.
For msft devs (and we are aging) it's win-win. The lure of C# gets you into mobile dev, and you will learn iOS and Android in the process.
No sarcasm intended. This is not an attack or a warning. This is curiosity.
React Native is capable of doing anything a native runtime can do because it too is native.
High quality tools do now exist that bring type checking, Intellisense, hot module replacement, etc.
In terms of runtime performance, I guess in theory c# should be faster than javascript, but it depends on a lot of things, like the program being run, the speed of the mono runtime on the android or IOS platform being used, etc.
Better than HTML5 is still not good enough.
MonoDevelop is a clone of Visual Studio written in C# which isn't even remotely compatible with the mis-named Visual Studio Code.
If they want to port MonoDevelop to Visual Studio Code, they would have to re-write all the features from scratch.
At this point they might as well re-write Visual Studio to node.js and not waste time on porting MonoDevelop.
I hope it doesn't happen. I certainly don't want to develop on an IDE written on top of a God-awful language with a ridiculously slow run-time.
Maybe when we finally have a universal bytecode for the web and ECMAScript 6 then developing on it will be less painful. Let us hope.
Already shipping with it. See:
They might have great intentions with MonoDevelop when it first launched, but it has been lagging behind other IDEs forever. With things like IntelliJ Rider, this position is not going to improve.
From my perspective Microsoft has done more with Visual Studio Code since its release 10 months ago than MonoDevelop has done in a decade. I'd argue it's easier to extend VSC to use it for C# development (which it already supports [1]) than to get MonoDevelop on par with modern IDEs.
And despite being JS/TS, the IDE is very very fast.
And then charging 1000$ annually per developer, per platform.
On the other hand they've made something that developers love (from what I've heard, I've never used Xamarin's stuff personally) so they deserve the credits.
Congrats to the team.
Still having a hard time understanding the new Microsoft, but so far really seems like a 180" from the Microsoft of 10 years or so ago.
The non desktop pieces of Mono should be getting lots of improvements, though.
The FOSS community weren't some hungry peasants that the aristocrats at Richmond took their bread away.
On the contrary, they were shouting how they don't need those stinking "proprietary" products, and that they can do one better.
There are free services for voice, video and text chat.
What is more difficult, politically speaking, is producing a free client for the Skype protocol. Clean-room reverse-engineering the protocol and producing a client that uses it without Microsoft raining down upon the project is not just a technical problem (or of not switching to cake).
The idea, and failed promise, of FOSS wasn't that there will be many "great FOSS projects around", it was that it will win the desktop (and not just as some FOSS released by some corporate behemoth, but by community -bazaar- FOSS projects).
That, it never did.
And in fact, in all those years, they've failed to even better Photoshop (Gimp is still far behind), MS Office (Open/Libre Office and co), etc and other such basics. Heck, compare GTK/Gnome's latest APIs to something like Cocoa (and even more so with Swift) and weep.
And then SaaS used server-side FOSS to kill the free part behind the service providers server farms. They can use all the FOSS goodies they like, and nobody gets to see their code or change it.
Your memory is selective: they did however, manage to make a better IIS (Apache, Nginx), a better IE (Firefox, Chromium) - even a better System X kernel (BSD as adopted by Apple).
Win some, lose some.
So, IIS and xBSD etc is out of scope regarding what I've said. I also mentioned explicity community/bazaar projects, in the original FOSS spirit of the late nineties that was said to conquer the world.
As for Firefox and Chrome, both are based from code by big (at least at the time) corporations (Netscape, and Apple, and later Google).
If the latter didn't get involved with Webkit, I don't see us using KHTML 2016 today. As for the former, Mozilla (which begat Firefox) also started with big commercial backing with full time employees from Netscape for several years (until the company burned to the ground), and until today works with mostly paid Mozilla staff, not random community people. It was able to do that based on inheriting some of the momentum of Netscape (which at one point was the number 1 browser), and, based on that, to ask for millions from Google etc to have it as the default search engine. Without Netscape's legacy code, 2+ years of refactoring/engineering work, and initial user base (at the time of the transition) it wouldn't have gone far.
In other words, yeah, open source can do a great job on the desktop too, if it starts as a proprietary code donation and has huge funding. But that "open source" is just a licensing model, so of course it won't be any different in any characteristic to proprietary projects, apart from the licensing -- the CLR released by Microsoft is also "open source" under this metrics.
My comment was about the FOSS bazaar model of volunteers from all over the world, the one touted by the Gnome, etc teams, -- which didn't fare as well on the desktop space.
Also GTK is a toolkit firmly linked to Gnome. The best toolkit currently available for Linux is Qt, and it's also cross-platform and integrates well with all desktops and operating systems it supports.
I would love to see how this turns out.
I thought this was announced end of last year already, with Xamarin moving there products to Roslyn and Microsoft offering Xamarin's products for non-Windows platforms... or did my mind just make that up?
What about the things that you can do in Objective-C but cant do in Java, or visa versa? iOS has some iOS specific features that I'm not sure how Xamarin could possibly map to Java.
You might have to wait a bit for new releases for features that come out in new OS versions, but that's not terribly surprising.
Xamarin is the equivalent of a thin wrapper/intercace over the platform-implementations. Xamarin doesn't really "do" much, it just calls the underlying API which maps to the specific behavior. The type and method signatures for Objective-C and Java are very near synonymous in Xamarin/C#.
EDIT: a new era for Developers, Developers, Developers?
Good luck and well done to Miguel et al.
Wouldn't it be cool if they gave this same treatment to ReactOS down the road? I think Microsoft has woken up to the power of open source technologies.
Which is why I expect MS to make Xamarin available for free, and push it quite heavily.
The only thing you can't do is issue new code by bypassing App Review (except web pages / web apps) or have your own non-sandboxed JIT.
They could have succeeded against Xamarin, but not Microsoft Legal.
Hopefully they'll keep Monodevelop under development, if they don't bring VS to Linux.
EDIT: ahh, they don't do the free shirt promotion anymore :(
From the outside, it seemed like such a natural fit that it was inevitable. From the inside, I'm sure a lots of things had to happen at MS. New Microsoft or not, it's still a big company with lots of people they have to support, so I doubt they take on such stuff lightly.
However it also makes it easy to add windows phone.
Xamarin.forms has nothing to do with winforms.
It's a cross platform mobile UI library.
Resistance is futile