Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

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

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

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.

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

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.

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).

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.

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.

"anti-MS sentiment"

do you mean "ethics"?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com