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Comment by FlorianRappl | Hacker News Reader

If Xamarin would be painless to use I guess we would see a lot more guys advocating it. However, personally I know quite a lot of app developers who tried Xamarin and disliked the quality of the tooling.

I hope that Xamarin keeps on improving as I believe it still could be (one of) the best x-plat option.

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I installed VS2015 + xamarin + VS emulator for android, downloaded some samples, hit F5, and they all ran fine.

The tooling is actually pretty good. Now the problem is a lot of the libraries I want to use are native android/java which means doing a lot of C#/java interop.

How painful is that? I might consider that a tooling issue.

Ideally, you should be able to specify the java dependencies you want and get some magical interface file generated for you in C# that makes it so you don't have to think so much about the interop, or at least remove any tedium / boiler plate. If that's not there, then I'd say it's a tooling issue.

It's pretty painful. I love using Xamarin and don't often need to use a native library but when it comes up it is the worst part of the Xamarin experience. There is a tool to help the process on Ios ,objective sharpie, but it's not the easiest thing to use either.

I have a team of developers that binds the most popular Android and iOS libraries. We bind the libraries that our users request.

If you have some of those that you would like us to do, we would love to help you. Anything to remove the friction from using C#.

Well if I can make requests, I was looking at OpenWebRTC in particular. :)

What about those of us who like F# and want to use that? Are you supporting that as well?

It's been a while, but I've had good luck using the "Bindings Library" project type to wrap native Java Libs. Sometimes I would have to build an intermediate Android project (using Eclipse or android studio) to proxy the calls, but it wasn't too painful. For iOS it's more difficult and a bit of a weak spot for the platform.

If you have a chance, ask your friends to send us their feedback. We are working non-stop on the product, but it always helps when real users share their stories with developers, otherwise we fall back into just looking at our internal task list.

My experience so far is that I tried to install it yesterday and VS didn't acknowledge it is installed. I restarted my computer and then VS was able to run the default project, but the project immediately crashed upon start, without any stack trace or pointer about what could have gone wrong. Not a great start :)

The Visual Studio experience is going down very quickly. I wonder what kind of QA they have that could let something like this pass.

None? My understanding is they culled QA across the board with the release of Windows 10. Gotta move fast and break things.

I think maybe we've taken the whole continuous delivery thing too far. It makes sense for web services/applications that can quickly be patched in a handful of locations to fix a problem for all users. It makes less sense for desktop applications that must be patched on every single user's machine.

It's probably a problem with the setup of your Android emulator. I had the same issue and had some more installations and config work to do before it worked.

This was my experience. You have to do a lot of downloading and setting up to do outside of VS to get the emulators working. And I never even got the Apple part setup because I don't own an Apple device. It would have been better if there was more help to walk you through it, there was just one static doc that was probably completely accurate the first week it was written.

I don't even bother with the emulator any more. It's too slow anyways. It's pretty easy to do USB debugging and wifi debugging directly on the device. Of course this only works for the devices that you have at your house, but I've found it to be much better.

Not sure which is setup by default; there is the Android SDK emulator and the newer Hyper-V based Visual Studio Emulator for Android. Based on @snarfy's comment elsewhere, I'm guessing the Xamarin installer isn't installing the VS emulator.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13176438

https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/android/deployment,_tes...

My biggest hang-up is true [edit: complete as in covers all platforms] xplat UI; Xamarin Forms targets mobile only.

There are a couple options:

https://github.com/picoe/Eto (Windows, Linux, OS X, iOS; Android, Windows phone: pre-alpha)

https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia (Windows, Linux, OS X, iOS and Android; all alpha)

For now I'm planning on using Eto since my initial focus will be on the desktop.

There is no such thing as true cross platform UI. You're either going to have to set things up as a least common denominator of all, not truly fitting in and ignoring the strengths and features of the individual platforms, or you're going to specialize so much that you might as well do it native for each.

Xamarin is really focused on mobile development, and in particular a large chunk of our effort is into making C# and F# great languages on both Android and iOS.

Our Forms API is a cross-mobile API to create UIs, part of a family of cross-platform APIs that allow for more code sharing across platforms (additionally we now have libraries for 2D raster graphics, 3D retained graphics, and various assorted device-specific libraries [1]).

Eto and Avalonia area really APIs on top of a .NET runtime, either Xamarin or .NET, just like Forms, and they have a focus on the desktop space. I think they are great, and we fix bugs and assist those teams when possible.

That said, some of our users have asked for a long time to share their mobile code on the desktop, so we have started an effort to bring Xamarin.Forms to Mac, and we will be extending this with support for WPF on Windows as well (in addition to the already supported Windows/UWP).

If you want to try out our Mac support, check out this branch:

https://github.com/xamarin/xamarin.forms/tree/macOS

[1] https://components.xamarin.com/

In my limited experience, the only thing that really sucks is having to keep an iMac or something else with the fruit logo on the case in the loop in order to cross-compile for iOS.

Xamarin compiles through XCode, so having Mac somewhere is a requirement. Any platform that compiles for iOS would have this same issue. I think the MS is pushing Xamarin Forms because it could eventually become a more direct competitor to React Native. In theory, you could remove the compile requirement for a Xamarin Forms only project. I am a C# guy, but React Native is attractive and Xamarin needs to have a compelling alternative.

Other platforms like Codename One ( https://www.codenameone.com/blog/comparing-xamarin-and-coden... ) can provide things like Java support for iOS, Android, Windows etc. without a physical Mac. They do it thru a cloud build process. It works properly because of the lightweight architecture.

Obviously the goals of Codename One and Xamarin are different whereas Codename One tries to be WORA, Xamarin doesn't.

The downside is that offline builds cost $399/month, though I would hope that they would make this functionality available to everyone if for some reason the company shut down.

You could load up osx in a virtual machine. It's what I do for dev on the go because I'm not going to carry multiple machines

Just keep in mind that's against Apple's EULA.

I've tried Xamarin a couple of times and found that it's come along leaps and bounds in recent years. Especially when you compare it to the crashy mess that is XCode.

I suspect it hasn't been widely adopted simply because it costs money and adds a dependency (Xamarin need to implement new iOS APIs before you can use them).

For me personally, I love C# and really tried to justify buying. But then Swift came along and it's a joy to use. Doesn't work cross platform, of course.

Xamarin is free now. Open Source even.

TIL! That's good news. We'll see what it does for popularity of the platform.

It's working fine for us...

No doubt there are areas where Xamarin will excel.

Lol- pun intended? (...Excel)

I sure hope so

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