Announcing Xamarin 3 | Hacker News Reader

Announcing Xamarin 3

blog.xamarin.com

185 pointsvdepizzol100 comments

I tinkered around with Xamarin, and a very basic app (using some 3rd party libraries) or even using the tutorial/sample apps was immediately outside of their free tier.

Now I would like to understand the logic behind the 30 day free trial. If you are preventing app distribution (binaries are only valid for 24hrs when compiled in the trial version) why restrict it to 30 days? Why not allow people to tinker around as much as they want? I see no negatives to having an unlimited trial, and then simply charge to remove the '24hr binary' restriction.

As it is, the little free time I had over those 30 days to play with Xamarin equated to around 5 hours, most of which was going through the tutorials and sample apps (which you cant use in the free mode). I certainly haven't experienced enough to commit to a purchase, and now I likely never will.

I spoke with one of your colleagues about this. He offered me 20% discount on the business tier if I purchased iOS and Android (~$1600 'value') within 4 days... All i wanted to do was evaluate the damn thing...

I think what you are doing is great, but please try and apply some common sense to your evaluations.

I agree; I haven't even bothered to tinker around with the free trial. The minimum price is too high to just buy to play around with and free version is too restricted to get a feel for the platform. What I would want is the ability to do everything but distribute/publish an application (even the 24 hour binary restriction is fine).

I also don't understand why Visual Studio support isn't included in the Indie price or the free trial since I suspect the vast majority of developers who want to code mobile apps in C# use Visual Studio. So for $300 I get a sub-par product and for free I don't know anything about it.

If you aren't a mobile developer today then there's really no reason to consider Xamarin. They aren't marketing to developers who currently aren't doing mobile development but are interested in it. They should be trying to woo developers who are on that ground level so we'll buy in once we're committed.

Thanks for the feedback; it's challenging to come up with the right model for evaluations, but we're taking this input seriously.

We do offer extended trials (up to 90 days); you just have to email us.

Since you are here, I want to voice agreement with prior comments on the need for an open ended trial for learning and evaluation but with restrictions only on making it commercial.

I've tried these kind of limited time trials in the past and have found in every case that my time proved to be even more limited. Suitably restricted open ended time trials, if possible, can only help you with sales ultimately. This is especially the case for people with sporadic bursts of time limiting loads.

I also agree with the criticism of the very large bump required just to use Visual Studio. OTOH, I might find that of no real consequence given enough time to fully evaluate the tier that contains just your IDE (which looks pretty nifty actually.)

Please kill the 64kb limit. You're just blocking little tutorials and samples, the starting point for most people.

Please, please, please do not read this as "make it bigger".

Seconded. I looked into it for games and specifically MonoGame and got blocked before I even wrote any code. Stupidest thing I've ever seen. Except for their shitty setup process with all the downloads that don't resume or retry, instead they just abort the installation for you if a single file fails.

Definitely this, the linking and binary size restrictions are simply stupid, do they really expect me to try the product with only "hello world" demos?

I don't mind the timebomb in the binaries, but seriously, if you want me to take your product seriously, better let me evaluate your product with real-world apps.

Completely agree, I've tried three times to start using Xamarin always hitting the paywall, it's annoying and I'm pretty sure they lost a lot of visibility this way. Just waiting for MS to buy them or release something similar.

I agree. It's a wall to scale and about half way up your thrown off by incompatible examples, a time limit that restricts any kind of real tinkering, and a price tag that makes you require paying clients before even knowing the platform!

Considering it's per-developer:

Imagine an enterprise of 20 devs hacking away at various Xamarin projects with one dedicated "deploy" person. They'd get away with not paying licenses for 19 of those devs.

Which would be breach of terms, resulting in unlimited civil penalties. It should be pretty easy for Xamarin to track that kind of behaviour.

If said enterprise was so inclined they could share a valid license, or simply create new trial accounts every 30 days.

Organisations I have worked for tend to be pretty hot on their licensing obligations. Fines can be pretty steep.

That assumes that we want to spend our time tracking down infringers (hard to do) and litigating (slow and expensive)

The assumption is the risk is high enough that firms will not infringe.

You're assuming that current overly crippled evaluation model is good enough to show off your product -- I think the overwhelming consensus is that it is not.

Well, thats your choice, but the duration of the trial doesn't affect that (given the 'workarounds' mentioned).

That's a good point but really this just punishes honest developers for the potential lost of income from dishonest developers. It's really no different than any other tool being installed by 20 developers using the same license key.

Most software firms take licensing very seriously. I'm not sure it's worth crippling their trial offering just to try and deal with the ones that do not.

They could do that right now anyway with a single license and a shared computer if they were really interested in circumventing the licensing.

I think a much larger issue is the current (and onwards) generations of indies, enthusiasts and kids who are actively prohibited from trying Xamarin.

For "non-enterprise" developers, I would suggest Corona instead, restricting in-app purchases and adding a revenue limit for the free/cheaper tiers feels like the best model in my opinion. It doesn't compromise at all the experience for developers:

http://coronalabs.com/products/corona-sdk/faqs/

Except that you need to use Lua (and most Xamarin customers are C# shops) and you don't have any control on the build process of the app. I hate waiting for some cloud service to send me back a binary version of my app. A slightly better alternative for Lua coders is to use Corona Cards (you do the building on your own machine) but this doesn't have a free version.

And while they're busy stopping that one enterprise from using their software without paying (which probably wouldn't have happened anyway) they're going to lose 100 potential customers. Not the best strategy.

Agreed, for all i can see Xamarin is perfect, but as i can't really play around with it and as it's quite expensive if you just want to publish a hobby app, i can't see myself using it yet.

Can't endorse this enough. Downloaded demo sample app, got my C# T-Shirt and Monkey, trial ran out, will probably never buy.

I have been working with Xamarin stuff for a couple years now, released about 7 apps with them and honestly cannot imagine another approach. I mainly work with smaller startups in specific line of business scenarios and it has become a necessity to not only have viable mobile offerings, but they have to have parity across platforms and support both phone and tablets. When I go into a sales meeting and pitch the idea that I can build for Android and iOS using the same language and sharing much of that code - I usually crush my competitors on price - which saves the customer money and makes more money for me (yipeee!)

The Forms work in Xamarin 3 seems lined up to make that pitch even easier and will likely help Xamarin grow into the enterprise even faster as ease of management in the code base is going to be a major driver in decisions for IT shops that now have to support a much more diverse platform set than they did in the days when a website was good enough.

Thanks for the endorsement!

We built Xamarin.Forms because we have lots of enterprise customers building apps with a dozen or more screens doing simple things like tabular data display and data entry, but who have a native UI requirement in their app. Xamarin.Forms should make these types of apps much easier to write quickly.

Seconding the post above, your clear moves towards the Enterprise have on my radar as soon as I have the resources to develop native mobile clients :).

Thanks for all the kind words, everyone! This release was the result of a lot of hard work; especially the new visual designer for iOS, which took two years to build.

You can read more about our platform here:

http://xamarin.com/platform http://xamarin.com/studio http://xamarin.com/visual-studio

And our new Xamarin.Forms library is explained here: http://xamarin.com/forms

Please, please, how about an affordable option for hobbyist/free app programmers? The current free Starter version isn't it.

Edit: Wow, natfriedman. If you could only see the uparrows this comment is getting :)

This. I have been using C# with Unity3d a lot and love it and i would love to try Xamarin with a sideproject, but $1000 per year/seat (yes i want VS integration) is just too much.

Making this more affordable would do wonders for C#s popularity in the mobile space and possibly trickle down to a lot of other usecases.

Any plan to also support Windows 8 in Xamarin Forms ? This would allow the same level of cross platform-ness for tablets.

Great work !

We don't have a firm date, but adding support for Windows tablets is on the roadmap. It will come in the form of Universal app support.

Excellent, thanks.

Great stuff! As an IB fan I am excited to try it out!

Kind of amazing that Xamarin now seems to have better dev tools for iOS than Apple do.

I was badly burnt by buying a Xamarian dev license a couple of years ago for $499 then not using it (my own fault entirely) so I've been hesitant to jump back in to Xamarin-world, but it's really only a matter of time. I'm very impressed.

Drop me a note - nat@xamarin.com

Would be nice if after subscribing you get a better price to renew your subscription, I don't see that as an option right now though, right?

For example my Xamarin License expired on May 24th; to renew I have to pay the full price again, correct?

Now all they have to do is make it free. Seriously though, as a student I can't shell out $299 for a license and even at the $99/year student rate (with proof of relevant course work), I can't see myself paying $99/year to write/maintain apps I've built. Especially considering the $99/year Apple app store fee.

Please, Xamarin, show us young C# devs some love!

update: not really sure why the down votes. I'm big fan of Xamarin and C# in general. All I was doing was pointing out that there's no way I can afford/am willing to buy their software and that I think I speak for the majority of student developers.

Not C# but give kivy a try. Cross platform and in python. Great for student projects and those looking for open source alternatives.

http://kivy.org/docs/gettingstarted/intro.html

Other open-source alternatives are haxe and phonegap.

http://haxe.org/

http://phonegap.com/

Comparison site:

http://www.riaxe.com/blog/top-cross-platform-mobile-developm...

I agree. It's a great product, but $300 per year is cost prohibitive for me.

I think $300 is a pretty cheap price to pay for a huge productivity boost.

It's only a huge productivity boost if you're already working with .NET. For everyone else the free trial limitations are so severe you're being asked to pay $299 just to try it out while most alternatives are cheaper, free, or open source.

I agree if that $300 was almost as much as my monthly rent lol :)

I certainly did not like the lousy words written above which explains the down-votes. But certainly the team at Xamarin can look upon his request and try if they can lower the license fee for students.

I wonder why the down-votes are for when all I was making was a earnest request for a price reduction for fellow students

Man, as much as I'd love to use Xamarin w/ VS, 3 platforms for a single developer (myself) is $3000. It looks like a great product but wow, I can't swing that solo while bootstrapping. Have you considered a free-until-release approach? Don't get me wrong, you guys need to make money, I'm just wondering if there is a more optimal / appealing approach for those that are between Indie and Business.

Awesome work! I wonder how responsive the UIs created are? The workflow looks a lot like Windows Forms (dropping elements in the editor and resize to match), and there it wasn't exactly easy to produce interfaces that could scale or even adapt.

So, in short: is this more Forms or WPF?

(I've looked at the subpage for Forms now, and the widgets presented there tend to lean heavily towards WPF.. so yay!)

We support a number of layout managers that allow you to create responsive UIs.

This is very important on Android since there is really no single form factor/screen resolution to target. You really need to build UIs that work on various kinds of resolutions.

Beautiful work. Congrats to Miguel, Nat and everyone on the team.

Funny that IB stinks so much they had to basically rewrite it.

Also, I like the (minor) redesign. Looks more solid now.

Thank you Dan!

Xamarin.Forms looks very compelling. In a former life I was a .NET person, and so I've always kept my eye on Xamarin, but the only real mobile stuff I've done has been native cocoa touch dev on iOS.

Even though Xamarin.Forms might be a lowest-common-denominator type of thing, being able to build basically "universal" apps looks awesome.

The indie license really isn't very expensive, but I wish the starter version allowed bigger apps (but maybe stripped out publishing to app stores or something), so you could really thoroughly check it out without spending $300.

Xamarin is the cross-platform solution I would consider first for developing mobile apps, and I can't think of a second one that's close. If your team is mostly experienced in C# or if F# is your thing, I would really seriously consider it versus training for iOS and Android. It's an very hard problem, and Xamarin has successfully gone from "That's neat but weird" to what looks like a practical tool that isn't going to leave you stranded with an oddball code base.

It's a real shame that Xamarin has a such a prohibitive pricing structure.

My employer would love for me to use this on projects but they simply won't pay that much for a tool EACH YEAR.

Considering Visual Studio, if you actually pay for it and don't go to an event and get a free copy, is a one time cost that a company can semi-easily justify (we've been on VS2010 for over 4 years now, with 5 developers, that's a major expense if we have re-subscribe each year).

But with Xamarin, unlike Visual Studio, it's a 1 year subscription. I hate to say it but I agree with my employer, as much as I LOVE using Xamarin to build mobile/cross platform apps, the current pricing model is just crazy.

I'd say drop the subscription only option (maybe have that as one of the choices), and add some 'buy it, you own it forever' options, hopefully without raising the price (ideal world you'd drop the price, too).

You do own the software forever. It doesn't expire after a year; you just will no longer have access to new releases and support. It's their last FAQ item on the pricing page.

It does seem a bit odd to hide that detail on the very bottom of the page. I have other development tools (JetBrains products) that having similar pricing models without signing up for a "subscription" and with a discount for renewing each year. I feel a lot better about that than what Xamarin has presented here.

The JetBrains stuff is also cheaper. I'd love to buy Xamarin just to play around with. But $300 for a single platform, and I don't even get Visual Studio support with it? The idea of using C# for apps really appeals to me. But only because that means I could use Visual Studio and ReSharper.

To compare that with the JetBrains business model. I can get a personal license for IntelliJ IDEA for $200, and there's even a free open source version that does 95% of the things I want with no limits. Their other products also have fully unrestricted 30 day trial periods.

I guess Xamarin isn't targeting indie developers or hobbyists in that field. Which is OK. But it feels a little insulting to have an "indie" license which is so prohibitive and at the same time expensive.

This looks amazing. Especially Xamarin forms.

Surely Microsoft will acquire them soon? They'd be totally nuts not to.

What benefit would Microsoft get by buying them?

A key position in iOS development. They could further the cause of C#-based apps significantly - and while it might look initially like they wouldn't want to encourage iOS development that moment has already passed. If they managed to make it much easier to develop for iOS and Windows simultaneously it could be a big win.

Ownership of a high-quality, viable, cross-platform mobile environment with its own UI frameworks. They could essentially stage a development platform coup on the leading mobile platforms.

Yes, because that's exactly what MS wants now. Another UI framework to support.......

Did you not pay attention to Microsoft's BUILD (Microsoft's version of WWDC) conference this year, where they gave Xamarin the limelight and official blessings?

It would go a long way towards providing potential users of Xamarin's long-term existence.

I've never played with C# or Xamarin but this tool set is looking really good, specially the F# thing.

Anyone care to share their stories about F#? it appears to be a nice functional language.

Hey Guys,

I'm the co-founder of Avocarrot (http://www.avocarrot.com/) and we were wondering for a while whether to build a dedicated plugin for Xamarin. How easily can you integrate an native Android or iOS SDK with your Xamarin apps? Would it make a big difference for you if a Xamarin plugin was available?

You have two options:

1. You can bind the native iOS or Android library into C#, which is relatively straightforward:

http://developer.xamarin.com/guides/ios/advanced_topics/bind...

http://developer.xamarin.com/guides/android/advanced_topics/...(.jar)/

2. Or you could create a single, managed library in C#, which would also make it easier to get Windows support.

Option 2 is more work.

I appreciate that this is an initial announcement, but does anyone know what the situation is with upgrades for existing users?

Edit: Forgot to say that this new version looks really good - congrats to the Xamarin team! Not having to launch XCode is going to massively improve my quality of life.

All of these features are available free to existing customers with current subscriptions!

Excellent. Thanks Nat!

Looks cool, but why translate to native UI elements at run-time as opposed to compile-time? Does it help with debugging?

Forgive my ignorance as I have not used Xamarin.

From a technical standpoint the "translation" is pretty much a standard Model-View-Presenter approach. This allows both us and you maximum flexibility when working with and extending Xamarin.Forms. We expose to users the same API's we used to implement the initial set of controls.

From the page: "...which are mapped to native controls at runtime, which means that your user interfaces are fully native. "

I read this as "we allow design in our forms library, but compile to native controls for use at runtime."

It took me a couple reads to come to that conclusion, I was also confused by the wording. If that is not the case, I definitely have the same question as you. Perhaps the page could use some clarification.

Apple's storyboards and xib files are essentially XML serialized views. Apple deserializes them at runtime and its a feature built in to Cocoa and Cocoa Touch. Since Xamarin is just wrapping the native libraries it is easier and more compatible to just follow the same approach.

They aim on enteprise clients otherwise I cannot justify the pricing.

I cannot imagine spending 600 USD for both platforms just to build hobby project (and with missing Visual Studio support) and if I cannot build a hobby project, how can I propose it to my employer when I don't have any experience with it?

I would love to use Xamarin and would be willing to pay (I could justify 300 USD for all platforms (iOS, Android, Mac) with Visual Support for my hobby and indie projects. I hope Microsoft buys them or they will be more friendly to indie and hobby developers.

Detailed review of the v. 3.0 Enterprise Edition here: http://www.drdobbs.com/240168321

I know that the official comment regrading Linux support is that there are no plans to support it right now, I just want to say that there are people on Linux that are willing to pay for your product!

I'm developing cross platform mobile apps with HTML5 and I would jump at the chance of using Xamarin instead (I was a C# developer in another life).

I might just end up running it in a VM, but it would be great running Xamarin Studio on Linux.

Thanks :-)

Once we charge you, you would expect the same level of support that we provide users on other platforms. And The Linux desktop is just too fragmented for us to be able to do this and deliver the support you need.

Thanks for your quick reply Miguel, I do understand the difficulties of supporting the Linux ecosystem.

I hope that someday it becomes worthwhile for Xamarin to provide that support, in the meantime, another laptop or a VM will have to do. ;)

Xamarin 3.0 looks great, congratulations!

But as always, no Linux support, sadly and a no go for me :(

Xamarin is great. I saw a colleague of mine developing apps with it and was simply amazed. I think it definitely deserves all they're asking for it. Just one thing though: Why do I have to pay 700$ difference per year just for VS support? Is it really that hard to integrate?

This is cool. I didn't know about Xamarin until now. I use Rdio a lot, and it's generally a very good, smooth-running app on my Nexus 4. Didn't realize it was built cross-platform like this!

Looking forward to giving this a try. I've built many mobile solutions in various languages / frameworks / platforms, but being new to C#, I'm eager to give this a go.

Looks great, love designer and Forms sounds epically wonderful (wonder if I can export my ios designs to forms for easier porting :-) )

First ten minutes experience: I've got a little weirdness with the differences in generated code from x-code vs new designer (an outlet name went from upper case to lower for instance).

iOS designer is giving prominent error "Custom components are not being rendered because problems were detected".. Though everything seems fine and log doesn't particularly help.

Sorry to hear about the error message. Can you email your logs and the storyboard file to support@xamarin.com?

Working on it. In a related issue, "copy file path / name" from a storyboard tab doesn't seem to do anything :)

Awesome work guys! Can't wait to give Xamarin.Forms a try!

I'm wondering how well Xamarin.Forms will work with MVVM and bindings.

Xamarin.Forms is designed to work with MVVM and data bindings: http://xamarin.com/forms

Thanks Nat! That's awesome news.

To what extend is XAML support in Xamarin.Forms? Can I use it to create multiplatform controls/views?

Yes, you can use XAML to create multiplatform controls/views with Xamarin.Forms.

Xamarin.Forms supports all of XAML 2009 and uses the XAML syntax with its own namespace and types. So, no existing XAML designer will work with Xamarin.Forms. However, the names and properties should be familiar to any experienced XAML developer.

omg, something finally supports XAML 2009. =O

Can I show two files open at once vertically split yet?

Follow Up: The answer is no. This is a pretty big productivity killer, and the ticket to implement this feature has been around forever. This is the last major gripe that is keeping me from using Xamarin Studio in lieu of VS2k12.

Xamarin Studio doesn't have this feature yet, but you can use Visual Studio to build Xamarin apps (and many developers do).

Split panes will be coming to a future version of Xamarin Studio, though.

Looks Great! Do you have any plans to integrate this with an MBaaS ( Azure looks like a great fit)?

We have support for Azure, Parse, and others already:

http://components.xamarin.com/view/azure-mobile-services

http://components.xamarin.com/view/parse

I don't understand how come that Indie license does not include Visual Studio support? I think the biggest issue with Xamarin for me is this: http://i.imgur.com/wmdaLL7.png

I agree. Xamarin has a price difference between "Business" and "Enterprise" but really the 600 bucks for Visual Studio support is what differentiates between Enterprise vs everything else.

I wonder if Visual Studio starting to integrate Phone Gap tooling could eat away at part of Xamarin's value proposition.

Regardless what Xamarin does with pricing, their announcement today with the new native UI builder is huge, congrats to the team.

I may be stupid, but I found Xamarin too bugged. And to use it well, i have to know C#, iOS and Android well. With Phonegap I need to know web dev well, phonegap, and much less of the underlying platform.

Site looks hosed, is there a summary of what was announced, specifically?

Yep, totally not responding and I have no idea what a xamarin is.

EDIT:

Looks like the main website is up:

http://xamarin.com/

They let you build apps for other platforms in C# which is cool.

How well does the new Forms stuff play with existing MTD? How hard would it be to transition from MTD to Forms?

You can mix and match.

The transition depends on whether you use MTD just as a consumer, or whether you subclass it extensively (like I used to do on TweetStation).

The former is easy, the latter not.

Is this available to download or what? Even as a beta?

It's fully released and supported. You can download here:

http://xamarin.com/download

The per-platform pricing is ridiculous.

Would someone please build an open source competitor and put these jerks out of business?

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