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Comment by alexkavon | Hacker News Reader

I find it interesting that this software isn't designed with Xamarin for all platforms, but instead uses Electron. I mean I get it, the cross platform libraries are better in Electron, but it side steps their current cross platform initiative.

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Xamarin doesn't support the platform the editor was originally written for: the web.

Not super relevant to the topic, but what's with Xamarin not supporting what is arguably the most important platform? This seems like a huge weakness, especially when you can now build a React app that renders natively on web and mobile thanks to React Native.

My impression is that Xamarin is designed to suck dollars out of corporate enterprise users who need to do something with mobile devices and can pay big bucks for Xamarin because it allows their C# devs to make a mobile app in short order. It saves them in the long run.

Isn't Xamarin free now?

They have a community edition but sell a corporate version with Xamarin Studio & SDK (not in community edition) for an unspecified price. It used to be $1,000 per developer.

Thanks!

Sorry, how does Xamarin not support this?

VS Code Initial release: April 29, 2015 Xamarin Acquisition Announcement Feb 24, 2016

And VS Code runs on the Monaco editor, which goes back a while before that:

http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-browser-based-dev-to...

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ARichNewJavaScriptCodeEditorSp...

It predates MS buying Xamarin, I think.

That's unrelated to why they chose TypeScript. They chose TypeScript because the editor was built for Visual Studio Online.

Good point. Forgot about Monaco for a moment here.

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