I think there is huge synergy [1] to be exploited by combining Xamarin's team with language/compiler design/visual studio team. I think MS is extremely well positioned to be a leading development platform across desktop/web/mobile in the enterprise space with this acquisition.
[1] Never thought I would ever use that word in a comment.
I inherited a Xamarin app on one project - and while there were certainly some issues here and there, the promise of native cross-platform app development and shared C# libraries is pretty compelling.
I said a few years ago that this should happen, so glad to see it actually come to pass! http://tmarman.com/Blog/Post/ba9a711f-dcdb-40b5-bca9-ad6eb5b...
This news is important because it solidifies the future of the .Net ecosystem in iOS, OSX, Android, Linux and Windows.
The Xamarin team has been doing a great job, but I am pretty sure that with Microsoft backing them they'll do a way better job.
You either die a developer or live long enough to see yourself become the manager?
Congrats!
Back when MS broadcasted OSX/nix compatibility for Visual Studio I felt it necessary to comment that .NET development has been supported in OSX/nix for over a decade.
In short, Miguel De Icaza should be awarded a medal from MS for his heroic effort in developing the Mono platform and tooling; in spite of the constant threat of legal action from Microsoft for 'patent infringement' of their supposedly 'open' (ie ECMA) standard languages and VM.
Hopefully, he finally receives public recognition and reward for all his hard work.
Luckily, we will be joining a new Microsoft (pending regulatory approval), one lead by Satya which has a different vision for the company. We are excited about what this means for Xamarin's products, for our customers, for our users, for our employees, but most of all, we are excited about what we can achieve inside Microsoft for all of Microsoft's customers, and the rapidly growing open source community around .NET.
Cheers! Miguel
...
>>> egularly used Mac OS X instead of Linux for desktop computing
Haven't heard of him before, seems like he's choosing being pragmatic over being philosophically right. I like this :)
Also, I'm personally not happy about this. I think people on HN should know better. Besides a couple of black swans being the exceptions that confirm the rule, acquisitions is how projects die. This is because acquisitions are either defensive or acquihires. And even when done out of a genuine desire for progress, big companies end up choking these acquisitions to death, after all they weren't capable of such progress in-house, with the project members moving on after one or two years when their contract expires.
But hey, people were excited about Nokia as well.
Binding APIs are some work but not impossible for OSS community to replicate if the CoreCLR and friends provided a portable platform with liberal licensing - so even if Xamarin disappeared it could be replicated - but I see no reason for them to shut it down.
And the third part of Xamarin is tooling which they can roll up into their own product offering.
Basically acquihire is a good scenario in this case because Microsoft is already moving towards these areas, Xamarin brings in talent and a bridge with working tech to provide transition.
i think it's confirmation bias you don't really think of all the many successful acquisitions only the bad ones stand out.
Mobile OK but Linux? Currently on the HN frontpage theres an article about how Skype for Linux hasn't been updated for years and "is unable to join calls": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11165568
They don't want end users to run Linux desktop.
So devtools/languages/cloud divisions inside Microsoft like Linux.
Those in ms who deal with end user applications (home users in this case, as ms push Lync to business) probably see little point in investing in development in Skype for Linux.
I think it can become the best alternative to the javascript world, which already can target all these, but needs all kinds of native support and is much less solid as a language.
Ugh no. Professionally, I would have a lot to gain from that as a developer but in general that would be an awful turn of events. Long term it would be a net negative for the world and we all should know better by now.
(Some sarcasm intended)
The rumor was Miguel told MS to "F*#K Off" when MS presented him with an offer many years ago. This lead to CoreCLR being open sourced and Visual Studio Code being built.
I'd like to know if by undermining parts of Xamarins business they were able to get them at substantial discount - especially with the tech industry downturn. Or if failure in the Windows Phone market has made MS desperate and forced their hand. Given it's undisclosed I'm guessing it's the former. I'd like to know if telling MS to "F#&K Off" was a good strategy :)
Acquiring Xamarin is just acknowledging that Windows Phone is DOA and their best shot at monetizing the mobile world is providing backend hosting/services and developer tools. That's not a secret - that's their publicly announced strategy.
I'd expect all the Xamarin tools to be built-in to VS going forward. One VS/MSDN subscription gets you everything and the tools will make it trivially easy to host on Azure.
The rumor sounds bogus. MS has been collaborating with Xamarin (and it's previous incarnation) for almost a decade.
What is it you think those to products are? They aren't trying to reproduce anything Xamarin does.
CoreCLR is part of Microsoft's "cloudy" strategy, they want to be on Linux micro-instances, and on Windows Server Nano. Visual Studio Code is just the absolutely minimum Microsoft has to do to make CoreCLR seem "real" on other platforms (a 101 UI).
Honestly the whole .Net open sourcing/porting thing is a lot older than this cross-platform interest and while the two are aligned right now I highly doubt that's what kicked it off.
As a CoreCLR contributor, my impression was always that the mono-team was extremely happy about .NET official going open-source and how that made it possible to align the two code-bases in a much better fashion.
I don't think I've ever seen CoreCLR portrayed as an effort to "undermine" Xamarin or mono. Rather I'd take it as an imitation, the ultimate form of complement.
Where did you get/form that picture?
I'd almost be surprised if there were previous formal offers as I'm pretty sure the discussions between Miguel and various MS folks, especially Scott Gu, were frank, open, and mostly trusting. You don't throw out formal offers if you have Xamarin openly talking through why they don't feel the time is right.
My take is Miguel and Nat have always been "do right by the technology first." They danced the line with mono and old MS. They then made a compelling step towards where MS would head a few years prior to MS being able to start showing progress in that direction.
You can see it right here in this thread: as another commenter said, not that long ago this news would've prompted universal predictions of doom, whereas now people seem thrilled. Timing is everything.
RoboVM was acquired by Xamarin in Oct. 2015 (https://xamarin.com/pr/xamarin-acquires-robovm)
It was a lot of hard work and dedication and, above all, constant shipping. Good for them.
Also, in the spirit of giving. I have released an open source version of a game in Xamarin.Forms and CocosSharp. It's a These Crazy Walls Clone.
https://github.com/jonedavis/Xamarin.Forms-With-Cocosharp
Hope someone finds it useful!
One thing I'm really looking forward to is efforts on the QA front. I'm scared to update every time as things are frequently broken, especially on the iOS side.
I'm looking forward to the day where I can ditch C++ for portability - .NET really is an ideal replacement for most apps - you can write apps that don't stress the GC by using value types and can control memory layouts relatively well (unlike Java) and at the same time you can use reflection, GC and all the niceties of modern programming platforms - unlike C++.
You can compile .NET code to JavaScript using JSIL:
Do you know about any bigger projects using JSIL ?
Or pay for DuoCode http://duoco.de/buy or SharpKit http://sharpkit.net/Licensing.aspx (both also available under copyleft-ish licensing).
I meant it in .NET context.
Satya Nadella is a breath of fresh air. I don't say that very often about top-level management (not that my opinion is all that important), I suspect if I was employed by Microsoft I'd feel proud of working there.
for the issue in uservoice 2700votes ATM:https://xamarin.uservoice.com/forums/234640-xamarin-suggesti...
1) addressing the price-point, 2) core clr integration, 3) retaining the top engineering talent at Xamarin, 4) addressing the iOS designer-specific issues
A couple notes:
For most LOB apps, I'm not convinced the code re-use is significant. The bulk of work is in the interface and navigation which is, necessarily, handled by coding android / ios specifics. Despite noble effort, the iOS design essentially needs to be done in xcode (point 4 above).
The build/release process is and (presumably) always will be locked behind the gates of technology's North Korea (Apple). They can throw a switch and restrict 3rd party runtimes if and when they choose.
For businesses in the 5-100 million range, writing an expense app in 2017, MSDN Xamarin should be a logical choice - but it has to be a platform with the reliability of .NET and a simple cross-platform designer. For app-centric startups, games, POS systems, etc. - it's probably a bad move.
For msft devs (and we are aging) it's win-win. The lure of C# gets you into mobile dev, and you will learn iOS and Android in the process.
No sarcasm intended. This is not an attack or a warning. This is curiosity.
Better than HTML5 is still not good enough.
MonoDevelop is a clone of Visual Studio written in C# which isn't even remotely compatible with the mis-named Visual Studio Code.
If they want to port MonoDevelop to Visual Studio Code, they would have to re-write all the features from scratch.
At this point they might as well re-write Visual Studio to node.js and not waste time on porting MonoDevelop.
I hope it doesn't happen. I certainly don't want to develop on an IDE written on top of a God-awful language with a ridiculously slow run-time.
And then charging 1000$ annually per developer, per platform.
On the other hand they've made something that developers love (from what I've heard, I've never used Xamarin's stuff personally) so they deserve the credits.
Congrats to the team.
Still having a hard time understanding the new Microsoft, but so far really seems like a 180" from the Microsoft of 10 years or so ago.
The non desktop pieces of Mono should be getting lots of improvements, though.
I would love to see how this turns out.
I thought this was announced end of last year already, with Xamarin moving there products to Roslyn and Microsoft offering Xamarin's products for non-Windows platforms... or did my mind just make that up?
What about the things that you can do in Objective-C but cant do in Java, or visa versa? iOS has some iOS specific features that I'm not sure how Xamarin could possibly map to Java.
Xamarin is the equivalent of a thin wrapper/intercace over the platform-implementations. Xamarin doesn't really "do" much, it just calls the underlying API which maps to the specific behavior. The type and method signatures for Objective-C and Java are very near synonymous in Xamarin/C#.
You might have to wait a bit for new releases for features that come out in new OS versions, but that's not terribly surprising.
EDIT: a new era for Developers, Developers, Developers?
Good luck and well done to Miguel et al.
Wouldn't it be cool if they gave this same treatment to ReactOS down the road? I think Microsoft has woken up to the power of open source technologies.
Which is why I expect MS to make Xamarin available for free, and push it quite heavily.
The only thing you can't do is issue new code by bypassing App Review (except web pages / web apps) or have your own non-sandboxed JIT.
They could have succeeded against Xamarin, but not Microsoft Legal.
Hopefully they'll keep Monodevelop under development, if they don't bring VS to Linux.
EDIT: ahh, they don't do the free shirt promotion anymore :(
From the outside, it seemed like such a natural fit that it was inevitable. From the inside, I'm sure a lots of things had to happen at MS. New Microsoft or not, it's still a big company with lots of people they have to support, so I doubt they take on such stuff lightly.
However it also makes it easy to add windows phone.
