While I'm sure it pays for itself in overall value if you actually ship a product with it, attaching a price that high to a development tool causes (IMO) all sorts of secondary effects like balkanized user community, inability to realistically use it for writing open source software that anyone will collaborate on, etc.
If the product cost more like $99 it might be able to overcome the inertia a bit better. I know I'd be willing to buy it for that even if I wasn't sure I'd ship a product on it, but $399 is Real Money, so as hypothetically interested as I've been in MonoTouch, etc, I've never really looked at it beyond the press releases.
I'd really like a way to build in VS (maybe against dummy assemblies or something) and kick it over to my MBP for real compilation and deployment, though. I respect their desire to funnel users through MonoDevelop, but it doesn't step to VS+R#.
Try downloading the evaluation version. It allows you to test with the simulator, and at least gives you a clue as to whether you might want to spend $399 on it. Of course, if there's no chance of that ever being the case it won't be a productive use of time.
- C# goodness, especially event handlers instead of overly verbose ObjC delegates
- It's fun to port ObjC loops to oneliners using LINQ and lambdas
- I prefer somewhat ugly MonoDevelop to pretty-but-very-odd Xcode
- I can reuse both C# and ObjC code, and ObjC code is straightforward to port, if needed
- Xamarin support is friendly and helpful
There are some things that annoyed me:
- Some generic-heavy C# code will crash the device due to AOT limitations—learned it the hard way
- MonoDevelop hangs for a few seconds after you switch from Xcode, even if you didn't change anything
- You need to make sure you _understand_ how MonoTouch GC works together with ObjC reference counting, or you'll get memory leaks
- You'll need to learn to use Instruments to find those memory leaks
- Debugger often freezes (should've reported this)
- Binaries can get heavy, but not too heavy
- Compilation is impossibly slow on Air, barely tolerable on Pro
- Lack of tooling for binding ObjC code—I wish I could just drop ObjC files and headers into a MonoTouch binding project instead of compiling it to fat binary first
But still, I'm glad we went with MonoTouch.
- You need to make sure you _understand_ how MonoTouch GC works together with ObjC reference counting, or you'll get memory leaks
- You'll need to learn to use Instruments to find those memory leaks
How much time do you think a C# developer with several years of experience would need to put into learning the ins and outs of ObjC memory management before their code could be considered close to production level?
Interesting, reading that makes it sound like a C# developer that wants to work with MonoTouch will have to verge off to learning at least some Objective C if they want to have shippable code.
The closest analogy to C# develop would be COM and P/Invoke. C# provides tools to interface with COM and native libraries, but you still need to learn some marshalling fundamentals so you can ensure GC doesn't collect objects while they are being used by native code, you need to implement IDisposable and not forget to free unmanaged resources, etc.
It's similar with MonoTouch: you need to understand that MonoTouch classes “wrap” native objects, that disposing of wrappers doesn't necessarily kill native objects because other native objects may still link to it, and that sometimes GC can't know for sure if an object is eligible for killing, and will never collect it.
In general, this comes down to: don't rely on .NET GC to kill native objects, do it yourself. My life got so much better after I started doing so.
Things that confused me most (and which are all you really need to know about ObjC memory management):
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13058521/is-this-a-bug-in...
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13064669/why-cant-monotou...
This is a great screencast I wish I saw before I started coding in MonoTouch:
http://forums.xamarin.com/discussion/33/finding-memory-leaks...
It explains how to find native memory leaks.
How much time does it take to learn this? No more than a week. But it takes more to find memory leaks in existing app so it's better to get some understanding and learn to profile early. For me, “fixing” a two-month-old codebase took about week and a half.
The other problem is the lack of linux support for their SDK. Seems rather odd, considering Mono's roots.
Perhaps more of your customers would use Linux for Xamarin stuff if it was available?
I suspect that they make the vast majority of their profit on MonoTouch (Mono for Android is great, but Java and C# are similar enough that there is a lower barrier). With that in mind, there isn't much point in focusing on Linux- you can't develop for Mac or iOS on it.
Didn't Mono get a lot of hate and vitriol from the Linux crowd over their support for C# and .NET on Linux and then was pulled from Ubuntu's default install because of it? I can understand why they would be shy about support if all they got were brickbats and hate mail.
http://np237.livejournal.com/24065.html
http://techrights.org/2008/03/24/mono-danger-to-linux/
http://techrights.org/2011/11/04/uds-on-mono/
http://www.itworld.com/it-managementstrategy/222227/bansheeg...
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/06/15/1251228/Mono-Squeez...
The first link is a very entertaining read.
For anyone who is thinking to start development of cross-platform GUI app in .NET, I encourage to check Eto project - https://github.com/picoe/eto
1. Xamarin.Mac comes with a commercial license, so you can ship to the Mac App Store (not allowed under MonoMac's LGPL license).
2. Xamarin.Mac comes with commercial support.
3. Xamarin.Mac includes bindings for several new APIs, including CoreBluetooth, GameKit, StoreKit, SceneKit, and the new Mountain Lion AppKit classes.
You can see a full list of differences here: http://docs.xamarin.com/mac/guides
The code is licensed under the terms of the open source Apache License version 2 or the MIT X11 license, at your own choice.
Also, the Mono wiki indicates you can already deploy to the App Store (which I've been looking at doing for a project): http://www.mono-project.com/MonoMacPackager
With the new release of the MonoMac add-in for MonoDevelop, you can easily turn your Mono application into a full Mac bundle, and you can also get a Mac installer for your application with all of the Mono dependencies bundled with it as well as creating Mac applications for distribution on the Apple Mac AppStore.
Is there something I'm missing?
How do you feel about Mono Xwt? - https://github.com/mono/xwt
"We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.
"This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor’s platforms."
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
FWIW, I've always thought this was an overly broad generalization.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20015954-264.html
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/09/09Statement-by-Apple...
"In particular, we are relaxing all restrictions on the development tools used to create iOS apps, as long as the resulting apps do not download any code. This should give developers the flexibility they want, while preserving the security we need."
(which is why I see so many Unity games on the App Store these days)
EDIT: I just noticed that they had a 25% Black Friday offer. Damn.
Well, being free never made Java on the Desktop go anywhere, anyway.
I would argue that Python would make more sense as a java-killer. It has the write once, run everywhere thing down much better (though still not good enough) than this.
Java is not going anywhere, sadly, and the linked product does not offer a compelling reason to believe that it will kill anything. All I see happening is that people who use mono now will potentially switch to this; honestly this isn't really ground breaking.
Granted, if you are just building a small application that you don't plan to support multiple platforms then that price would seem steep.
Many still write code without thinking one second about performance.
Java isn't C, but if you code thinking about performance it is possible to write quite usable applications for many use cases.
And even for that "It runs for day's on end without being a significant burden to the rest of the system" is hardly something to write home about.
It's a lowest common denominator.
It has a couple of very good free cross-platform ide's.
It's write once -run everywhere to a certain extent. While java gui's may be a bit ugly they let you run self contained apps with no dependencies except for the jvm(installed on more the 1/2 of all pcs).
The vm (at least the main sun/oracle hotspot / openjdk) has a world class jit and gc.
This is all in spite of Java the language, which is kind of a lame duck. Java 8 should improve things if it ever gets released.
1) Tons of experienced and battle-tested people in the ecosystems
2) Standards that keep improving
It's a dual-edge sword thingie, on one hand standards are good for stability but bad because sometimes it slow innovation down. Having said that, the Java ecosystems typically have one strong alternative outside the standard so your choices, in most cases, come down to 2: use what comes from SUN/Oracle or use the leading open source alternative solution. Simple.
2) great third party libraries,
3) decent documentation and tons of books and instructional material,
4) best-in-class virtual machine, good GC, as speedy as you get with managed code,
5) tons of profilers and development tools
6) several industry leading tools written in it (Hadoop, Lucene/Solr, Hbase, etc) and for it (IDEA, Eclipse),
7) Enterprise support from big companies (Sun, now Oracle) and IBM, and several smaller ones
8) Keeps improving (closures added in current 8 beta for example)
9) A large ecosystem of interoperating JVM languages, from Ruby/Python like (Groovy) to Haskell like (Scala), to Lisps (Clojure)
10) 15 year history, and at some point it fixed a lot of C++ pain points for enterprise programers
Did I choose the wrong option? If so, which one should I be testing? Why can't I test out all features of the tool?
Also, I agree with everyone else that the price point being $399 is way too high for personal development. Would it be possible to get something cheaper for personal development to see if it's actually useful for my needs?
Also you could try MonoMac which is almost the same thing, and is OpenSource. The Xamarin version is supposed to have Wider API coverage and do a bit more (for the cost).
http://www.mono-project.com/MonoMac
> the result of weekend hacking as our day to day work
> revolves around Mono's efforts on Linux servers, Linux
> desktops, Visual Studio integration and our mobile
> efforts. Luckily, it shares some components with MonoTouch.It has evolved over the years to also adopt new programming techniques that have proved to be useful (generics, iterators, functional constructs, delayed-execution frameworks, Async programming features and dynamic features).
But the idea is that you start with a safe environment that is relatively fast, close to C, but where the goal is not maximum speed, but increased productivity, fewer bugs.
Then you try to optimize things to get closer to the performance of a native C compiler. For some things, you can get there, for some others you can not do it.
So it leads to a different style of programming, you spend less time thinking about book-keeping, about making sure that you did not free the same buffer twice, ownership rules and so on, and you can focus more on the problem at hand. In day-to-day life, you spend less time tracking down production bugs.
It is not a silver bullet, and wont fix every problem, and you still need to do careful bookkeeping of other things (like, did you load too many images?) but at least you can ignore the grueling minutiae and focus on what matters most.
It is a little bit like the difference between using raw OpenGL and loading your vertices manually every time or using a toolkit that loads meshes and textures for you.
It would still be a lot of work because they don't try to abstract any of the UI or other things for you (and imo, they shouldn't). But if your app fits into this kind of design, and if you like C#, then it could be very valuable.