Xamarin raises $16 million to help you go mobile
blog.xamarin.com
blog.xamarin.com
Admittedly, there are a few bugs here and there,mostly in the build chain, but they get fixed fast and support is excellent.
The only feature request I have is to allow us to give feedback on the docs. Whille 95% are awesome, there's little mistakes here and there. I suspect customers will gladly help trace those down.
Of course there is a way to write your own bindings, but the those threw a bunch of undecipherable error messages as well and never really worked either. The main problem was that there were way too many possible sources of the errors to try and just diagnose the problem and the error messages themselves were useless.
So basically xamarin was great as long as you didn't need to use a third party sdk and there is 0 chance that down the road you might need to use a third party sdk.
That was really the deal breaker for us, that we were severely limiting our future capabilities on any app we made with monotouch.
Also it is often difficult to pull in third party c# libraries because monotouch uses weird versions of all the main .net references. But this was not the main problem.
In the end it is just much easier to bite the bullet and use obj C.
I am happy to pay for the license for a guarantee of continuing (and timely) updates.
Plus, looking at their target market, I don't think free, open source model would be as effective.
Disclaimer: I am a Xamarin customer.
For me, Xamarin developer is kind of associated with Clarion developer, PowerBuilder developer.
I still think you have a good point, and I agree, but as for myself, I decided to make an exception in this case. I don't think it's quite as bad as PowerBuilder or Clarion at least.
Xamarin Studio and MonoDevelop are the exact same code base.
The only difference is that Xamarin Studio contains the iOS and Android plugins, plus adds a Xamarin Branding (branding is completely pluggable in MonoDevelop)
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15900963/is-it-possible-t...
I'm not in the mobile apps business, but if I were, I would consider the price worth it.
As a freelancer, I see a lot of people requesting Android and iOS apps. I don't see myself developing in both Objective-C and Java. With Xamarin I could cover three platforms with one language, which also happens to be my language of choice for productivity.
I still think it has great value and you most likely could share some of your code between devices. It just wasn't as seamless as I had thought supporting multiple devices. I think HTML based apps do have that one advantage.
I was particularly pleased when MonoDevelop 4.0 got the new Xamarin Studio UI. A bit vain, I know.
It's also not restricted to just using their solution, any native iOS / Android / Whatever platform apps can use them.
we got a growing staff with an expertise in C#, and he's decided to have one of his guys write each new mobile app in java or objective c, despite the fact that no one else has experience in these languages.
but most of all, i know i'm one day going to have to look at the code base for one of these apps, and I dread it.
The tools are getting better with each release.
Kudos to Miguel, Nat, Rolf, Seb and other folks I don't know :-)
Unfortunately nothing worked. I was blocked at every turn.
The FSharp.core assembly is in someway there and not there (create a project and it's in error-red text, but the compiled app runs). I asked and asked on the IRC channel how to fix it. Programs compiled in Xamarin would work on the host OS, but on Windows would complain about missing assembly. The same project on Xamarin would not compile in Visual studio for the same reason. I never figured out how to properly build executables for both windows and both, or how to arrange my project files to work on Xamarin Studio and Visual Studio. I never figured out how to fix this.
I also tried to play with GTK with F#. Their GTK builder is C# only. OK, fine. F# isn't 1/10 as popular as C#. I know.
So how about iphone? I could drop ObjC, rewrite my app in a language I admire, and finally bring my app to android. However, the sample F# ios app, without modifications, compiles to an executable that is too big for the trial limitation of Xamarin Studio. Wait, the sample "hello world" app (which is supposed to convince that the IDE is worth paying for) can't be run in the trial version of Xamarin Studio? I asked and lurked for days in the IRC channel. In a patronizing exchange with one of the developers, I was told that the Fsharp assembly needs to be embedded into the ios binary. Because of this, the trial limit is reached. An update will fix this later.
Oh well. Nevermind. Once again, I'll shelve the idea of cross platform development.
But seriously guys, can we get System.Data.SqlClient to the point that it's production ready? the only thing that's holding us back from rolling mono in production for our entire stack.