Xamarin Acquires Petzold | Hacker News Reader

Xamarin Acquires Petzold

blog.xamarin.com

90 pointsot67 comments

Programming Windows 5th edition (1998, 1400pages) still stands in my bookshelf. It's still relevant for Win32 development.

I could not thank Petzold enough for writing Annotated Turing book. If you ever wondered what Alan Turing's seminal paper meant in depth but with friendliness warmer than "for dummies" book, give it a try.

It's a shame their Indie plan doesn't include Visual Studio support, without that there is way less value as a developer imo (and at $1k/yr still steep for their business plan).

One day. One day I hope Xamarin will find a different financing model, or like you said include VS support in their indie plan. It's just far too expensive right now.

Yeah. Also, I find it very sad that you cannot even try the Forms API before buying the suite. Their model only works for companies / individuals that don't care about the pricing.

I also dislike their pricing. But their CEO was very open to discussing it by email the other month when they had a big new release, someone more articulate than me may convince them on the merits of a different model.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7810310 => nat@xamarin.com.

Did they get rid of the eval period (30 day money back guarantee is not the same as an eval period) when they switched to a monthly subscription model?

Edit: the trial is mentioned in the extended FAQ http://xamarin.com/faq#pricing

One thing I didn't realize was that it any app built with the trial version can only be used for a 24 period. My plan was to build a LOB app, get my company to see the value in it and then have them purchase the full license. The 24 hour window makes that really difficult.

I'm basically sitting here twiddling my thumbs and once VS support is included in indie (aka not ridiculously expensive) I will immediately buy a subscription. Until then, my (limited) money goes elsewhere.

Just looking at the pricing model again and I see they've introduced monthly subscriptions. Going for the business plan will be, paid monthly, marginally cheaper than the annual subscription fee. I think I'd rather pay $83 a month than $999 at once.

You can dev for free with android/ios tools, you don't have to use Xamarin. The point of Xamarin is that you can make more money faster by developing and releasing for multiple platforms from one code base.

Compared to developers salaries, it is very cheap.

True. But then again, Xamarin Studio is not a developer. :)

Yes, but if it saves your developers enough (expensive) time, it would be worth it.

It does. It's the best native development system currently around imho and will, one day, be replaced by HTML5 probably. But that's not now ; especially with Forms and our own iOS API on Android/WP8 implementation, we are much faster to market with much better results than possible with HTML5.

compared to US developer salaries.

Well, compare to eastern European salaries then ;)

$1000 is a decent monthly salary for a lot of developers in Eastern Europe.

Don't mind me, but this is giving me flashbacks to 15 years ago when this was the Qt user's response to the FUD about license prices given out by certain developers who may or may not have later founded and joined Xamarin.

Fascinating how the tables turn.

SOME developers in SOME places. Plus, there are a mountain of various things that are "very cheap, relatively" that are all competing for budget.

I have come to the conclusion that people A) this sentiment is an edge case and B) people will never be happy.

The last time there was a thread about Xamarin on here the top comment was complaining about the cost of a license, several weeks later they announce monthly pricing.

Now the complaint is we don't get Visual Studio support with indie pricing. Seriously folks? I am not trying to be a Xamarin apologist but the company has to make money and find a model somewhere that makes sense - putting VS support in an up-level SKU makes all the sense in the world if you follow the trends.

Look at it this way, the majority of Xamarin customers who want Visual Studio support are businesses for whom the cost of the licenses is irrelevant in the larger picture (I dont want to provide a math lesson but if they x-plat savings are manifest, the ROI on the licenses is near immediate). That is where Xamarin can find the margin to support the lower tiers. If they had the ability to support the entire company on $25/developer/year then I venture they would because there is value for them right now not in taking profit but in growing the developer base. Alas they are not doing that which tells me they are finding customers in the enterprise more than willing to pay for their product. In order to get TRIPLE the revenue per customer they add one specific sweet spot that they know nearly all those customers want - Visual Studio support. If they put that in the lower tiers they nuke their margins because it is the feature that matters most to the enterprise dev teams who are often filled with people who know and enjoy visual studio above other environments. It also enables them to not purchase a secon machine (mac) for each of these developers which gets beyond the hardware and licensing costs and has an effective cost on IT operations.

So yes, it would be nice if Visual Studio support were included in the indie tier - but it would not be prudent. Besides, how many 'indie' developers do you know are actually completely dependent on Visual Studio? I love Visual Studio and half my consulting revenue comes from the hours I spend in it - but the other half of my time which is usually spent doing mobile development is done in Xamarin Studio because - surprise, it is really pretty good.

> Now the complaint is we don't get Visual Studio support with indie pricing. Seriously folks?

My comment from that thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7811180

So now instead of $3k out of pocket for VS support, it's only $1k. I'm sure it's a good product, but my complaint has not changed (so I'm not sure why you said 'now the complaint is' since you're replying to someone that has maintained the same complaint). I mean, if you wanna gimmie $1k so I can test out Xamarin+VS for more than 30 days, I'd totally be down, but until then, I'm merely posting on HN (since their company reads HN) that it is still cost prohibitive even though I want to give them money.

Why do you think you need VS support. Care to expand? Just a preference or something else; I am just genuinely curious.

There are lots of good tools / plugins for VS, and its extensive debugging capabilities are awesome, plus it's my most used IDE for side projects and when I was working on pre-boot firmware. With MSFT adding in more support for things such as TypeScript, consolidating my workflow to a single IDE would be very handy. Plus, with the weight of MSFT behind it, I have more confidence they'll fix and deploy breaking issues faster than a small company trying to cover that and their own IDE.

And also lots of personal preference :-)

Edit: woah, their pricing isn't actually changed, they just removed the "per platform" from the pricing table to the sub-heading. So it's back at $3k for VS support for iOS/Android/Windows :-(

    >So it's back at $3k for VS support for iOS/Android/Windows :-(

Given the current Windows Phone app market it's probably more cost effective to skip that platform in Xamarin and just work in VS with native project types.

For most people it might be, but I'm a solo bootstrapper, so time == $^$ for me :-/

I'd really like to see a trial until release subscription option, I think that would afford a lot more people time to test and play with what Xamarin has to offer, 30 days just seems too limited to really dive into it unless you can guarantee you won't get pulled off onto other tasks/projects.

Ask them nicely to extend for another 30 days. Most companies I've asked to do this have been happy to do so.

The problem with "trial until release" is it would leave the door open to all kinds of jailbreaking/sideloading shenanigans. Sounds like more trouble than it's worth.

I heard on a podcast one of the Xamarin evangelists (don't quote me on this but I think it was James Montemango) state that if you request an extension you can get a 90 day eval. But that was before the subscription pricing plan was available so that may have changed.

Visual Studio is included in BizSpark so a lot of indie/small companies are using it (our startup included, 5 people all in all).

Would be nice if Xamarin offered something for BizSpark, as I know they have some offerings for people/companies with MSDN subscriptions.

They do have a "call us" for small business.

You miss one point - companies with more than 3 employees can't buy the indie plan anyway so they lose nothing.

If I was Xamarin I would have made the Indie plan much cheaper, in order to grow the ecosystem, because that is their biggest weakness right now. They are already at a no brainer for companies, but lacking an ecosystem they may end up like Delphi.

Of course I have also been arguing to everybody who wants to listen that MS should by Xamarin as an investment in their mobile business.

Yes, they are making a mistake. Just look how well Unity3d is doing after embracing indies on a budget.

Xamarin Studio is a really awesome product that doesn't get enough love because of anti-MS sentiment.

I would use it a lot more if they let me show two files at once.

Very serious. I use sublime text instead for this singular reason.

Xamarin Studio 5.2 supports this.

Indeed! http://developer.xamarin.com/releases/studio/xamarin.studio_...

Well, there goes my last reason. Downloading now.

From whom does it not get this love?

I've talked to lots of people ranging from investors to developers, for whom "C#" is a dirty word because of its relationship with Microsoft (which, at its most benign, is viewed as stodgy, old, and slow by these folks). In my humble opinion, it's a shame, because their developer products are fantastic, and Xamarin has done a great job of bringing those tools to new and highly relevant platforms.

It's funny - I have the opposite view having worked in C# years ago and appreciated that it was a lot more flexible and pragmatic than Java (as a language - libraries and platform aside).

To me the problem is that it's not native to either Android or iOS, and so good as it is, there is always some impedance mismatch.

Are there any great apps developed using Xamarin that feel fully native?

I think 'feel fully native' is a misnomer. They are fully native. When you build for iOS you use xib or storyboard for layout (or native code adding views/subviews directly) and the same for Android, you use layout files.

There are lots of great apps out there, Rdio was one of the more prominent early ones and it is also interesting to note that Unity3D games run on the same underlying framework (mono) http://unity3d.com/showcase/gallery

I note that you didn't provide an example.

He did--he called out Rdio (http://rdio.com) as an example.

Presumably that is the only one. Xamarin features it, but everything else they feature is an in-house corporate line of business app. If there are 'lots of great apps' out there, you'd think they'd tell us.

Not encouraging.

Well, right now I have just built two "in-house corporate line of business apps" and so far, the pay was reasonable and time-savings due to underlying framework huge :)

That's fine - the point is that in those cases the end-user is not the customer, so cost-savings trump user-experience.

There are some case studies here: http://xamarin.com/customers

Screw C#. Xamarin's party trick is F#. It's basically Swift, on steroids, which lets you write a single codebase to target Android, iOS and Windows Phone.

Has anyone actually done this?

Yes. I don't know of any big apps like Rdio that you would recognize yet, because Xamarin hasn't supported F# that long, but there are cross-platform apps being written in F# now.

Actual consumer apps, or in-house line of business apps for corporations?

I believe Tachyus (http://tachyus.com) is using Xamarin + F# for their product.

So, no. Not a consumer app.

"...F#. It's basically Swift..." - that slow after compilation???

What I hear in the market is that people are scared of a (already rumoured earlier this year) takeover by MS. Because it's not totally open source, that is a very real danger and companies need to take that into account. I love Xamarin and how it works but experiences from the past after acquisitions does make us cautious in going all in on it.

Well not having a linux working version ( at least of xamarin.android) is not helping to fight back that sentiment

Do you create windows versions of your applications or win 8 apps? If not, you are being hypocritical.

Well, first I am creating a little game, and MonoGame (awesomely cross-platform opensource port of XNA) is awesome, and I would love to work in officialy supported Xamarin on linux and not fiddle around with old builds of MonoDevelop.

And second, for doing any serious CI/QA-Automation, Linux sucks the least IMHO :) But that might be just the years at RedHat speaking :P

Targeting the 1-3% percent of developers willing to work on Linux doesn't make much commercial sense.

You're confusing developers with generic end users/consumers. Yes, Linux has a low market share among the general population, but it's quite popular with people who write code.

For a lot of things it's important to have a decent terminal emulator, a Unix file system etc. Windows has none of these out of the box and even things like Cygwin are a pain to use.

Xamarin recently hired the maintainer of Mono on Debian to work on getting Linux versions of Xamarin working

That is true. I have a Xamarin plan for use with Visual Studio for developing mobile apps in F#.

However I'm just keep running into stumbling blocks and general frustration developing in Windows, having switched from 10yrs of Linux purely for VS. With the general improvements in Mono and the open sourcing of F# I'd love to use them all together on Linux and take advantage of the greater OSS developer ecosystem there.

Monodevelop/Xamarin Studio is fine for development, more so with the newly-added split-view, and the F# support is pretty much on a par with VS these days, but without Xamarin.Android/iOS support I simply can't move.

Maybe I should suck it up and buy a Mac instead.

> Maybe I should suck it up and buy a Mac instead.

That is definitely the more comfortable migration path for users coming from a Linux background.

If you don't want to give your money to Apple, grab a used Macbook Pro and throw an SSD in it. The latest version of OS X runs on models all the way back to the early 2008 edition and maybe even further.

"anti-MS sentiment"

do you mean "ethics"?

I have been nearly sidelined twice by underestimating C# and MVVM (which is what Xamarin forms uses).

If you think that C# is just MS version of java then please take a deep look at it again. The only big thing that I can think of adding to it would be pattern matching - it has pretty much everything else, even monads for threads (async await) which is crazy awesome.

C# 5.0 is like Java 10.0 (when/if it gets released).

Code is a great, great book. Thank you Petzold.

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