Xamarin Blog

Xamarin actually ported Android to C#: http://blog.xamarin.com/android-in-c-sharp/ And has some cute benchmarks to show off for it. But go one more level deep: Despite Microsoft's Community Promise, many places and legal teams will still view a potential threat if MS has a copyright on APIs used in Mono (not to mention patents). It's a great win-win for Microsoft. They get to trumpet their PR and gain face with open source people, as well as deflect some criticism. But they know it'll still not hurt them as much as if they officially blessed Mono with a full, proper, transitive license.

This is one of the main reasons CouchBase was created. Its community has fragmented as the company tries to figure out how to make money, but it would be worth your time to check it out. Here the Xamarin folks explain their new CouchBase Lite wrapper: http://blog.xamarin.com/simplifying-persistence-with-a-document-databa…

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

Great news if true. I've always thought MS should be more involved in the Mono/Xamarin platform. It makes far more sense for MS's mobile strategy than adding Android compatibility to WP. Instead, encourage devs to create a single .NET app that can be deployed to Android, iOS, and OSX, in addition to first-class support on WP and W8. You'd lose out on the current hot apps, but for the future it makes sense. For instance, several Nokia X Android apps were ported from their WP counterparts using Xamarin - http://blog.xamarin.com/nokia-x-for-csharp/ . My only concerns if this were to happen are, * What happens to Mono on Linux, BSD & OSX? Does Mono simply become a deployment target for mobile devices? * What happens to MonoDevelop? Will VS be the only way to develop such apps? * What about the web? I'd love to see a Mono port to pNACL or asm.js. An NACL port already exists, but it would be great to have one codebase targeting almost all platforms. Either way, as someone considering using .NET with ServiceStack on the backend and Xamarin on the frontend, it's very exciting.

Actually Xamarin proved otherwise. https://blog.xamarin.com/android-in-c-sharp/ Also .NET compact framework is not the same runtime as the .NET Framework, .NET MDIL (WP 8.x) or .NET Native (WP 10/UWP). Actually, thanks to being AOT compiled to native code, budget WP 8.x and WP 10 device, used to be faster than their Android counterparts on the same price range.

Something like https://blog.xamarin.com/android-in-c-sharp/ ?

https://www.xamarin.com/forms Mac desktop support is in preview (https://blog.xamarin.com/preview-bringing-macos-to-xamarin-forms/), and Linux and WPF backends are in development. So ... almost there!

Xamarin.Mac is the project emcompassing bindings from Cocoa (i.e. native macOS) to Mono/.NET, the interface with Xcode for building Cocoa UIs, and Visual Studio for Mac (previously called Xamarin Studio). Essentially, Xamarin.Mac allows you to build C# applications that run on macOS with native macOS user interface elements. See e.g. https://blog.xamarin.com/your-app-on-66-million-macs-c-sharp-on-mac/

I assume there's plenty of options... Qt or gtk bindings, electron, etc Looks like Xamarin is building full cross-platform support via XAML https://blog.xamarin.com/glimpse-future-xamarin-forms-3-0/ Avalonia seems like a straightforward reimplementation of WPF that is already usable. https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia DotVVM is working on electron support, and I work with it already. I like it. https://github.com/riganti/dotvvm-electron

Blog post announcing this feature https://blog.xamarin.com/glimpse-future-xamarin-forms-3-0/

Xamarin.Forms support for macOS is in preview: https://blog.xamarin.com/preview-bringing-macos-to-xamarin-forms/

It's not GA yet (only Visual Studio 2017 for Windows is GA today) but we have shipped an update so Visual Studio for Mac Preview 4 is now available. Details: https://blog.xamarin.com/better-apps-visual-studio-2017/

> GTK is probably the main reason Gimp isn't a serious competitor in professional work, then. Xamarin Studio is built using Gtk and actually looks nice on macOS, or at least I have seldom heard people complain about it: https://blog.xamarin.com/the-making-of-xamarin-studio/ I think the problem is that Gimp is understaffed to produce a Photoshop killer with any toolkit.

That's not true anymore, Xamarin is now free for everyone, except larger companies, see https://blog.xamarin.com/xamarin-for-all/

I believe Xamarin is now free post the MS acquisition with various parts and pieces even becoming open source: https://blog.xamarin.com/xamarin-for-all/

Thanks for the kudos everyone! This is a very exciting day for those of us who have been working on Mono and Xamarin for many years. We have some more details on our blog: https://blog.xamarin.com/xamarin-for-all/

I'm wondering why doesn't Google ditch Java entirely and create something like XobotOS[1]. I know it wouldn't be a popular move but at least the devs will get a decent language to use (C#) and users will have a better performing OS[2] [1]: https://github.com/xamarin/XobotOS [2]: https://blog.xamarin.com/android-in-c-sharp/

> Not everyone is ... working on mobile apps http://blog.xamarin.com/xamarin-passes-1-million-developer-milestone/

They plan to change it, from http://blog.xamarin.com/microsoft-and-xamarin-expand-global-partnershi… 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.

I'm not from Xamarin but their latest blog post sounds positive: http://blog.xamarin.com/microsoft-and-xamarin-expand-global-partnershi…

It's moderately interesting because it was built using Xamarin. So the top iPad app (at least for a little while) was built using C#. http://blog.xamarin.com/tom-hanks-vintage-typewriter-inspired-hanx-wri…

Sure. It's probably better to link to the blog post that has the video and the slides available: http://blog.xamarin.com/webinar-recording-native-mobile-apps-in-xamari…

Xamarin maps iOS and Android API's 1:1, and you usually have access to bindings within days (sometimes hours?) of SDK releases. Note the date: http://blog.xamarin.com/introducing-ios-7-support/

Xamian also ported Android to C# a year ago. http://blog.xamarin.com/android-in-c-sharp/

If going by the stats that Xamarin gave[1] for Dalvik versus Mono on Android 4.0, Dalvik is also much slower than Mono. Though obviously Xamarin is not the most independent source in the findings, but I would believe it to outperform Dalvik in my own uses of both it and Dalvik for Android apps (I bought a license for it 6 months ago). There's also some results by Koush Dutta[1] (Cyanogenmod contributer and Clockwork Recovery developer) from 2009 showing similar findings, though obviously that's way old and before Dalvik had JIT added in Android 2.2. We had a discussion sometime ago about that article on hn as well[3] [1] http://blog.xamarin.com/android-in-c-sharp/ [2] http://www.koushikdutta.com/2009/01/dalvik-vs-mono.html [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=421862

See above - Xamarin are big contributors to mono. They have 190,000 developers and 10,000 customers already http://blog.xamarin.com/2012/11/08/xamarin-evolve-2013-our-first-devel… so mono's future looks secure now

We just blogged a case study from the PictureTHIS, an app from the guys that did Draw a Stickman: http://blog.xamarin.com/2012/08/07/picturethis-fun-for-both-ios-and-an… They have a nice case study. You do not have to pay before you try, the evaluation version lets you do all your development on the simulator. If you like it, you can buy it and deploy to device. And if you are unhappy, you can return it within 30 days. That said, we will work hard to make sure you are delighted with our product, and keep you as a user.

Eto is very interesting but unfortunately there seems to be just 1 (very active) developer behind it, from what I can see. On the other hand, Xamarin.Forms had an announcement recently, an announcement that Hacker News missed. I submitted the news a few days ago but it didn't reach the first page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14383467 -> https://blog.xamarin.com/glimpse-future-xamarin-forms-3-0/ TL;DR: Xamarin.Forms will support desktop environments: - Windows (WPF) - MacOS (Cocoa) - Linux (GTK#) This is on top of the mobile bits: iOS, Android, UWP. As an added bonus, they've added Xamarin.Forms embedding into native interfaces. It's actually major news since Xamarin.Forms would become the first cross platform UI toolkit that: 1. supports both desktop and mobiles 2. is backed by a major vendor 3. is truly usable from a memory managed language as part of the core offering

See also http://blog.xamarin.com/xamarin-acquires-petzold/