Comment by jasallen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasallen | Hacker News Reader

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Xamarin is a tremendous accomplishment, but microsoft should tread a little lightly here. As it stands, Xamarin may have nearly saturated the market it has available to it.

To operate on Xamarin effectively, in addtion to C#, you need to be able to (1) Make use of Objective C documentation and Stack Overflow, etc. (2) Make use of Java documentation and SO (this is easier). (3) Learn the AXML UI development patterns of Android, (4) Learn the nib UI development patterns of iOS.

For (1) and (2) Most of your corner cases have not been hit by Xamarin devs yet, sure, growing will help this, but it will always be just like Mono and C# documentation -- there is some mono information, but often, you go back to the MS CLR documentation and try to figure out where its not quite the same. So right now, you are looking at let's say your A+ through B- level developers as being 'capable' of handling this. Microsoft needs big box corporate knucklehead "developers" to be able to succeed with their tools go get the kind of traction they need.

I don't say this is an impossible task for Microsoft, in fact, they are second only to jetBrains in terms of developing the best IDE's (that was my #1 hope was that Xamarin would contract with JetBrains for Xamarin Studio) and they certainly have more resources and the expertise to get it done. But it's not a home run, and it's not nearly 'right once, run anywhere'.

This could be a super exciting development, I'll be watching for more!

"As it stands, Xamarin may have nearly saturated the market it has available to it."

The key part of that is "the market available to it" (Xamarin).

Right now a .NET/Windows shop that wants to have an iPhone app has a choice between doing (1) xamarin, (2) having devs learn native iOS development, (3) try one of the HTML5 app frameworks, or (4) contracts the work out. Certainly in the cases of (2), and (4), and maybe (3), it's entirely possible that a Windows phone version of the app will never be built.

While the ".NET shops only use stuff from Microsoft" meme isn't exactly true, it's accurate in a decent number of cases. If Xamarin is "from Microsoft", though, all of a sudden all of these .NET shops that might be considering options 2, 3, or 4 have a much bigger reason to choose option 1. And hey, now that Xamarin's from Microsoft, I bet they make it really easy to build your iOS/Android app for WP, too.

The way I see it, at this point, Microsoft doesn't want to compete on apps. They're never going to be the primary target for most apps until they have the market share to justify it. So, how to best level the playing field, apps-wise? Make it super-simple to build an app for iOS, Android, and WP at the same time.

> As it stands, Xamarin may have nearly saturated the market it has available to it.

No way Xamarin has saturated the market with their licensing costs. $1000/yr per seat (for VS integration, last I looked) is cost prohibitive. If this deal lowers that cost significantly, it's a very compelling way to go for lots of devs.

I agree. If they wrap this into their MSDN subscription packages, then it opens up a ton of new users.

Ximarin exposed native phone options in C#. They didn't make a compatibility layer to ease development. As you said, build your UI twice, then get native tools to compile. Now with Windows Phone we'll either have three UIs to build, or a generic abstraction layer (that Apple will reject.)

Why would they reject a "generic abstraction layer"? How do you think Titanium works?

Disclaimer: I hate Titanium

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