I can't find an accompanying article or anything for this. I'm curious as to why Microsoft would put something like this out? Why make the comparison in the first place? Why compare it to Swift?
Also, the code at http://aka.ms/scspostercode is nice.
Also, the code at http://aka.ms/scspostercode is nice.
I definitely see it improving in the future (I personally view Xamarin development as a better option for Android than standard Java), but it's not something I would recommend for an actual workplace to use.
I agree it's an inconvenience but I find after the initial setup it works quite well. My workflow is to have a Mac Mini under my desk, with a USB extension lead taped beside my keyboard. Then I plug my iPhone in and once I push F5 Visual Studio talks to the build host which talks to my iPhone and builds/deploys/starts debugging and everything "just works".
The biggest impediment to being productive with Xamarin, in my opinion, is that every second release manages to break something.
Storyboards are a decent solutions for certain problems, but if your app ends up as one monolithic or a group of large storyboards, you are going to be structuring and defining things in ways that will have friction with some of your better practices in your C# code.
That's not to say Xamarin "should be a cakewalk, you're doing it wrong." I found pain with dealing with the same area you describe -that back and forth with designs built heavily in storyboard. Not to mention, so many helpful posts on dealing with UI features and quirks seem handled or better handled in plain old NIBs + custom code, etc. Drag and drop layouts with D+D segues are nice, but when the client wants things "just so" I'd end up having to tear things out of the storyboard/designer to get all the things moving and performing well.
The storyboard failed me with AND without Xamarin.
I am also really loving Swift when you can use it on its own (I.e., without relying on an older Obj-C based library). The strictness of the type system eliminates many runtime bugs.
Your suggestion makes no sense to me.
For example I am not a C# developer, rather a developer.
I use whatever technology stack our customers require us to do. I change project almost every year.
So I can imagine some customers would have iOS only projects and in those cases I would try to push for Swift instead of Objective-C.
On my case, enterprise customers actually went with Cordova for mobile multi-platform. On the few projects I took part on.
For my hobby projects so far I went with C++, as they tend to be small multimedia stuff and I don't feel like paying Xamarin for hobby projects I do with months interval and sometimes are left unfinished when life takes over.
So Native UI + C++ (now C++14) suits me better, although the NDK is a big pain to use and quite limited, but at least Windows Phone and iOS are nicer to use.
If I had to do it professionally on my own company, maybe Xamarin would be an option, specially since Qt seems to be way behind Xamarin in terms of device support.
And why not setup an iOs project with a portable core project so you could build an Android/Windows phone/other project next to it in the future?