Comment by taspeotis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by taspeotis | Hacker News Reader

Yes please.

Having suffered through MonoDevelop and now Xamarin Studio (which is much nicer) and the various bugs introduced each time you upgrade Xamarin.Mac and other miscellaneous problems I'd love for Microsoft to come in and:

* Polish Xamarin's tools

* Polish Xamarin's code (and swap out Xamarin's implementation of the core CLR/BCL with Microsoft's own ... presumably MS' GC is two cuts above the Mono one)

* Add more QA to the release process (I don't know how Xamarin.Mac 1.4 got released with a broken NSApplication.BeginSheet implementation)

* Make Xamarin's Visual Studio integration free

* None of those "WCF is Xamarin Enterprise only" licensing restrictions

* Buy MvvmCross too

(Don't get me wrong, Xamarin's platform and what they do is amazing. But even if it works 99% of the time that's still a lot of things going wrong, given the size of .NET. Microsoft's tools and code aren't perfect either but I find I have way less issues with them relative to Xamarin.)

> None of those "WCF is Xamarin Enterprise only" licensing restrictions

Are you kidding me? Let's suppose Microsoft buys Xamarin and doesn't bury it. Further, let's suppose that they actually pump money into polishing and enhancing their tools. Do you actually believe that Microsoft wouldn't wrap 10 flavors of Student, Home, Business, Pro, and Ultimate licensing around the result?

You don't really know/ understand Satya. That would sort of be the opposite of what he'd do with this.

WCF is part of the .NET Framework and there's no .NET Framework Student Edition ... .NET Framework Home Edition ... .NET Framework Ultimate Edition.

Parts of the .NET Framework like PEX and Code Contracts were restricted to Visual Studio Ultimate until recently.

And Fakes as well, but none of those are part of the .NET Framework. They're part of the ALM tools Microsoft sell.

I think it would be great, if they would polish the core libraries.

Too many subtle differences when I've tried it the last time (some years ago). Afterwards we changed our course and stopped using it.

We were mostly interested in using Winforms applications on Windows and Linux - but it didn't really work for our application. I had the feeling that Xamarin wasn't interested in making the code any better for our use - instead they were interested in mobile application development.

If Microsoft baught them I really wished our use case would be improved too.

re: Visual Studio integration and WCF restrictions

At the very least it would be part of Bizspark and Dreamspark, as well as the MSDN packages aimed at larger businesses that make a la carte purchasing of these things unnecessary. That's the real barrier: Can I justify $600 more dollars per seat for just VS integration and WCF? No. Can I justify another $2000 for the whole company for that plus a slew of other features? Maybe.

The VS integration fees crush me. I love(d) that dev story while I had it.

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