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Comment by aespinoza | Hacker News Reader

Xamarin actually works quite well. Microsoft will definitely bring in more quality as they have huge amounts of resources not only in cash but in talented people.

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.

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"Works quite well" is a phrase I've never used with Xamarin. I stopped using it about a year ago for two reasons: (1) _every_single_release_ would break my apps and would then require spending inordinate amounts of time trying to get things building again, and (2) I could no longer justify paying for the professional edition just to be able to use Visual Studio on my hobby projects.

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.

Yeah, that thousand dollar per developer price tag is a little steep. I built out a cool little proof of concept app in it last year on a trial license, but it was just not worth it to go in at that price on it, when a mobile client would effectively just be a free feature for us. Using one of the webview wrappers was the better decision at that time.

Per developer per platform. Two guys developing for ios and Android would pay 2k every month. Add the damn exchange rate (I live in a 3rd world country), and the price is blocking for anything but enterprise development.

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.

It was the per platform pricing that killed it for me. I was so annoyed that a solution for multiplatform development made you pay twice. I liked their T-Shirt promotion idea with the tshirt store demo, but that errored out on me and it was their code.

As an alternative, you can use RemObjects Silver (multiplatform Swift + .NET) for free.

Having the experience of dealing with the Android NDK, JNI wrapping to be able to use C++ as portable code across Android and WP, I think the 25€ a month are quite reasonable for having someone else go through that pain for me.

Relevant http://www.estaun.net/blog/some-thoughts-after-almost-a-year...

Thanks I was looking for a good review of Xmarian.

Both points are endemic of smaller and newer companies (does xamarin still qualify?), poor legacy and deprecation strategies / product roadmap, bad pricing structure. I think Microsoft can aid in both categories.

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