Major upgrades to Xamarin’s platform: Async is here
blog.xamarin.com
blog.xamarin.com
The same story is repeated again and again. Tool vendors think more about profits than about growth and adoption. Sun limited usage of server side Java on Linux which allowed PHP to occupy linux server side niche. When it understood that it made a mistake, it was too late. I am afraid, we will be developing mobile applications in JS in several years' time.
Where exactly do you expect them to get the funds to develop this technology if they don't charge a reasonable fee to use it?
Why corporation like microsoft are offering os, ides, tools and also devices free to develop to those categories of people? 'Cause if you make them learn maybe they will make/support the adoption of your platform in the professional field in which they will work.
This is why Xamarin fees are nonsense. It's ok to pay high fees in the professional field, but you must offer low fees for new entries. And not, indie costs (299*2/3) are not enough low, and the starter pack is just useless.
In case of Xamarin, there's no such choice. Only Xamarin can compile C# to iOS, and if the license changes, the whole project implemented with the tool is locked in. The only option is to rewrite the whole project with alternative technology.
I think, LGPL open source core SDK + paid IDE + paid additional libraries would be a much better choice which mitigates the risk. But Xamarin for some reason decided to choose a different path.
Yeah, in QtQuick! (unlike Xamarin, Digia lets you use all the development tools out of the gate with the paid-license-only ones really enterprise centric (like the Oracle dbms client) and the foss version is lgpl so you can use it in your apps no problem (as long as you don't modify).
Also, C++11 has async! http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/thread/async
The only barrier to qtquick in mobile is that Apple won't let Qt include v8 for the same reasons Chrome can't. So you are stuck on qtquick1 on ios.
You may not have fully understood the C# async/await feature.
The C# compiler rewrites apparent linear code that awaits on a future (Task in .NET) so that all the code that comes after the await goes into a continuation of that future. It can even rewrite a loop with an await in it into a chain of continuations, all the while taking care of hairy details like propagating exceptions.
Now we'll need the Mono equivalent for the Xamarin iOS api's etc.
Mono-ception.
However, their license makes their technology a niche product, when it could have been the main way mobile applications are developed.
is this so bad? I see at a competitive advantage to use their platform.
I'd rather ship 1.0 and 2.0 quickly to learn from customers than focus on the one true way to build mobile applications.
Does not seem very niche to me.
Nobody's going to pick up Xamarin for fun, for experimentation, for learning, for scratching a creative itch. You can't download it for your kids or recommend it to your students. They have no product for use outside of companies and that guarantees it will be and die a niche riding on companies not wanting to retrain their .NET developers for iOS and Android.
Earlier this month I got to choose between Xamarin and everything else, I have years of C# experience and I like their IDE for general c#-on-mac stuff.
I chose Haxe instead.
Actually Miguel started the Gnome project, wrote Gnumeric, sponsored Evolution, etc.
Even Mono was once to be used in Linux and Gnome.
They were forced off Gnome, by valid license concerns, FUD, zealots and not few indiffrence.
What are they to do? Roll over and die?
The result is still compelling: the UI is native, the underlying code is common on all platforms, you get to use 100% of your platform technical capabilities, the app runs as fast as native apps, you get the power of .Net development tools (even Visual Studio if you want) and all the cool features of C# 5.0 (and F#) to build your apps.
Xamarin, through Mono and its mobile development tools is actually building what Microsoft promised but never really delivered: platform independence for .Net (OS/X, iOS, Windows, WinRT, Android, Linux).
What about MonoDevelop for the desktop? The Windows and Mac download packages are at v4 but Linux at v2.6. Are Xamarin slowly abandoning use of GTK# ? Is this because of GTK 2 v 3 fragmentation?
Should we be supporting C++ and QT given that QT now supports iOS and Android? Given that some developers are scared of C++ what about C# / F# with QT QML? Are there any bindings which are maintained and tracking QT updates?
On GTK+ 2, it's still the main toolkit used by the IDE, but on windows/mac some bits of the native toolkits are used to improve the user experience.
QT on iOS and Android means you get non-native UIX. So why bother with C++?
Disclaimer: I work for Xamarin.
- Write your core business logic API once (in a Portable Class Library) using the ModelView ViewModel pattern.
- Design native user interfaces for iOS, Android, Mac, Windows Phone 7.x, Windows Phone 8.x, Windows Store (RT and Desktop) and Windows WPF.
- Bind your user interfaces against the core business logic.
Multiple platforms, native user interface designed for each platform, sharing one core business library, maximum code reuse (90%+!), using either C# or F# with async/await/linq/lambdas/anonymous types, etc.
You can use Visual Studio or MonoDevelop.
Rewriting your business logic multiple times over in different languages to target multiple platforms does not make sense. I'm curious why would anyone not use Xamarin?
Evolve 2013 Videos: http://xamarin.com/evolve/2013
Recommended ModelView ViewModel Frameworks: https://github.com/slodge/MvvmCross or http://www.reactiveui.net/
Previously, I had assumed that the point of Xamarin was a way for C# developers to make iphone apps. However, my understanding was that rdio uses it so they can reuse the same C# code across their iPhone and Android apps. Rdio raised $17M in funding and could easily hire native iOS developers if they wanted to.
The net result is that rdio is actually one of the better iphone apps that I use, and I was really surprised to learn that it wasn't written in objective-C.
Mid tier developers not so much.
you get a 10% discount on the total price if you buy multiple licences at the same time
You can see all here: https://store.xamarin.com/#purchase
Anyway i was not talking about the support option, but about the chance of deploy a full serious multios app. With phonegap you have that for free, with xamarin you have to pay (299*2) minus discount of 10%. Just this.
I'm sure it's powerful but it doesn't come across as obviously amazing like LINQ did.
When you can use yield you can use regular control flow like branches, for loops, etc to write iterators in a straightforward manner. If you can't use yield you instead end up needing to represent all that implicit control flow using explicit stacks and things like that. Similarly, async/await let you write asynchronous code very similarly to how you would write a synchronous version of the same thing.