Comment by WorldWideWayne | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WorldWideWayne | Hacker News Reader

The key points seem to be:

"Available Wednesday, Visual Studio Community 2013 is a free, fully featured edition of Visual Studio including full extensibility."

So, it sounds like this will replace the Express edition and let you install extensions like you can in the Pro version.

"Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 2015: build for any device - Built from the ground up with support for iOS, Android and Windows, Visual Studio 2015 Preview makes it easier for developers to build applications and services for any device, on any platform."

It almost sounds like you're going to be able to run VS2015 on different platforms, but I doubt it. Maybe you'll run the web version of VS2015 to develop from Mac/Linux?

"To further support cross-platform mobile development with .NET, as part of their strategic partnership, Microsoft and Xamarin announced a new streamlined experience for installing Xamarin from Visual Studio, as well as announced the addition of Visual Studio support to its free offering Xamarin Starter Edition — available later in the year. "

This is very interesting - .NET is going fully cross platform but they haven't bought Xamarin...are they planning on competing while keeping their frenemies close or something else?

http://blog.xamarin.com/microsoft-and-xamarin-expand-global-...

"Today we’re excited to take the partnership to the next level, by announcing:

1. Support for Visual Studio 2015 – Today, we released support for the Visual Studio 2015 Preview release, which includes Xamarin templates that make it easier to discover and download Xamarin from within the IDE.

2. Free Xamarin Starter Edition for Visual Studio Users – Today, Microsoft announced a new, free edition to Visual Studio—Visual Studio Community. Visual Studio Community contains support for extensions, which means it will be Xamarin compatible with from day one. We want to help make Visual Studio Community a tool for anyone to create native apps for iOS and Android, so we are announcing our plans to enable our freely available Xamarin Starter Edition to work with Visual Studio Community. We are also doubling the size limit on apps that can be created with Xamarin Starter Edition, so that you can build even more capable apps for free. This will be available in the coming weeks.

3. Special offers for MSDN Subscribers – We’ve worked with Microsoft to create a 20% discount for Visual Studio Premium and Ultimate MSDN subscribers to purchase Xamarin Business or Enterprise Editions, or world-class mobile development training with Xamarin University, available up to 60 days after the Visual Studio Purchase."

So the free Xamarin users will get Visual Studio support, but us with Xamarin Indie still have to use Xamarin Studio? I just want to use VS with Xamarin! But I guess that won't happen, because that's the only worthwhile reason to purchase their Business subscription (and the whole >5 employees clause).

Yes ... I'm in the same boat, however the 'core' of my app I developed as a PCL, the substantial part of developing for which I spend time in VS and using Resharper. Xamarin Studio is pretty OK, but VS is damn good to develop with.

One theory I've read is Microsoft wants Xamarin to stay third-party so Microsoft's competitors continue working with them.

Xamarin is working with a great many companies who would think twice about working with Microsoft directly. This way Microsoft can shove money to Xamarin to forward the ecosystem without scaring anyone.

Nice theory... but they went the opposite direction with Nokia.

I don't think they'd have any issue purchasing Xamarin and importing/re-branding.

Nokia is a totally different case, so doesn't invalidate his theory.

Nokia sells to consumers, so there wasn't the problem (as his theory suggests) of corporate clients not wanting to have business with MS.

Not saying that his theory is correct, just that it's different case to Nokia.

Nokia was also definitely pre-Nadella. The Xamarin theory supports Nadella's whole "cloud and mobile services" schtick.

AFAIK, Nokia didn't want to be affiliated with MS...not the other way around.

Not only that, but Xamarin's independent existence is like free insurance for companies choosing .NET - even if Microsoft were to drop support (unlikely, but look at Silverlight), Xamarin would continue providing a viable way forward for the language and runtime. Now that MS's .NET is open source, Xamarin's .NET is like OpenJDK - Xamarin is a governing body and authority for the language/API if Microsoft were to drop it. So it's good for Microsoft to have Xamarin as an independent entity.

Xamarin is IntelliJ, and Mono is OpenJDK

More like Xamarin is IBM. From http://openjdk.java.net/faq/ ... if you replace these words from that FAQ, it's remarkably similar to the current .NET situation (even though Xamarin is much smaller than IBM, the amount of attention each company gives to language & core framework development is probably on a similar scale).

> Oracle and IBM announced in October 2010 that we will collaborate in the OpenJDK Community to develop the leading open-source Java SE implementation, and make the OpenJDK Community the primary location for open-source Java SE development. Oracle and IBM will support the OpenJDK development roadmap that was proposed before JavaOne 2010, which accelerates the availability of Java SE across the open-source community.

The iOS and Android part don't make sense to me. Surely you won't be running VS on your iPad? So are they saying it has support for compiling to iOS and Android? Wouldn't they need to mention Xamarin in that sentence for it to make sense?

I doubt the idea (at this point) is to "RUN" Visual Studio on iPad/Android...

My money is on the App Creation naively in VS 2015 - via Xamarin or similar plugins - instead of having to rely on tools like Eclipse or IdeaU.

I think I'd lose my mind if I could develop apps in Visual Studio and C# instead of having to use Java and pay $1000/year for Xamarin.

It would destroy Xamarin if they made it free to develop C# for iOS/Android.

Highly depends on what the deal between Xamarin and MS is. For example they could work out a deal with Xamarin where they would provide free access under same terms as Visual Studio community (the >5 people) and Microsoft could pay them more than enough to cover their loss while promoting their development stack.

Doesn't Xamarin have a load of other stuff around testing and the like?

It could just mean a move away from Xamarin as a core development tool into producing things which support development on these platforms.

I highly doubt Microsoft will release and support Linux/OSX/iOS/Android API bindings.

What will likely happen is Microsoft will :

* open source the core libs

* open source the JIT

* make sure it works on all platforms

* open source the ASP.NET and port it to Linux/Mac so they can separate Azure from being a Windows only cloud service

Xamarin then packages these in to Mono and Xamarin.iOS/Android providing a layer on top of MS core stuff. Microsoft will then be able to sell .NET as a truly cross-platform solution and make VS/Azure more popular where it's probably losing to other OSS ATM.

I agree re Linux and OSX but I could see iOS and Android. The scale of mobile is such that if you want to be relevant in the way MS have historically, they're two platforms you can't ignore.

I think it's just an oddly-worded sentence. They're saying that you can use VS to target multiple platforms (including IOS). They're absolutely not saying you'll be able to run Visual Studio on an IPad.

I believe they mean you write code in VS and target Android/iOS/etc for builds. It sounds like it's moving more towards a regular IDE than very .NET specific.

It does not sound like you can run VS on different devices.

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