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Ask HN: Is Xamarin worth learning?

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Re: Ask HN: Is Xamarin worth learning?

#101

Post by V-2 »

ghuntley wrote: post #33
miguelrochefort wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XAML and MVVM are much nicer to work with then their iOS and Android equivalent. WPF/UWP/Xamarin.Forms are very underrated.

You can do the MVVM pattern on iOS and Android; it's an architecture choice.

Not quite.

For MVVM (unlike MVP and the like), you need the "glue" that ties viewmodels to views. Rolling it out by hand is far from trivial, not to mention things such as IDE support etc.

The official Data Binding library by Google - in my opinion, the only sane way of attempting MVVM on Android - is fairly new. If I'm not mistaken, they've only recently moved it out of preview stage, and they didn't tout about it much anyway.

Re: Ask HN: Is Xamarin worth learning?

#102

Post by V-2 »

xeromal wrote: post #90
dep_b wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XAML and MVVM are awesome, but I wouldn't touch Forms with a ten foot pole. I really miss having something like the bindings like they work in WPF in Xcode

I occasionally go on rants when remembering the WPF days and realizing I now spending 30% of my time fixing dumb stuff like NPM breaking, gulp going crazy, or realizing I'm using 6 month outdated tools because the kids found a better one. I felt like I really had a chance to learn WPF.

In my opinion WPF was MVVM done badly, and never fixed. Having to implement complex converters just to map a couple of radiobuttons to an enum was ridiculous. The amount of boilerplate made it look like a joke. As someone said, WPF makes the difficult simple, and the simple - next to impossible.

Re: Ask HN: Is Xamarin worth learning?

#103

Post by taormina »

gtsteve wrote: post #100

I have read some fairly negative comments in this thread. I have experienced many of the negative aspects myself, and while I don't disagree with them, I would still say that it is worth learning this technology. Microsoft's strategy with bringing a phone to market appears to have failed so they're going to have to take the next best thing which is owning the development tools. I expect the outlook for the software t…

My primary question, as an Android developer who can write decent enough Swift when needed and who does not develop on any Windows platforms, is why should I learn Xamarin?

Re: Ask HN: Is Xamarin worth learning?

#104

Post by rogihee »

V-2 wrote: post #99
rogihee wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use VS2015 a lot for .Net ASP dev, but when I do Xamarin iOS dev I tend to do it in Xamarin Studio on the mac. Much better experience, fast deploys/builds. I miss Resharper but can live without it.

Very recently Microsoft introduced VS for Mac (although I understand it's sort of a preview version). I don't know about OS X, but I used Xamarin Studio on Windows and it was horrible.

That is a rebranded Xamarin Studio, with a slightly updated layout to match VS.

It feels much better on mac I must say, also tried it on Windows but just weird and slow.

I'm quite happy with it, but maybe I'm biased a bit because it sucked big time and they made big improvements to it last year. It's all relative ;-).

Re: Ask HN: Is Xamarin worth learning?

#105

Post by king_magic »

eonil wrote: post #89
king_magic wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had completely the opposite experience. Have worked on several medium-to-very large Xamarin projects (4 developers up to 60 developers) and rarely have I seen code sharing drop below 50%, with the sweet spot being around 60%. 2 years ago, Xamarin was buggy as hell. Today, (IMHO) it's quite stable. Edit: downvoted for sharing my experience? Stay classy, HN.

Can I ask the products you have worked on with Xamarin?

NDA'd, but I'm focused mostly on enterprise mobility

Re: Ask HN: Is Xamarin worth learning?

#107

Post by king_magic »

lanestp wrote: post #66
king_magic wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had completely the opposite experience. Have worked on several medium-to-very large Xamarin projects (4 developers up to 60 developers) and rarely have I seen code sharing drop below 50%, with the sweet spot being around 60%. 2 years ago, Xamarin was buggy as hell. Today, (IMHO) it's quite stable. Edit: downvoted for sharing my experience? Stay classy, HN.

Can you elaborate on what kind of apps are you developing and where you are getting good reuse? My apps are generally heavy on the UI and moderate data and I'm wondering where the sweet spot is.

Enterprise mobility mostly; moderately heavy on UI (UI standards in the enterprise are rising, particularly for mobile users), but I generally find the bulk of reuse is in workflow, local persistence/offline storage + data synchronization + security/encryption + enterprise infrastructure integration / cloud & "other" services integration (e.g. CMSs, CRMs), etc.

Re: Ask HN: Is Xamarin worth learning?

#108

Post by andyjohnson0 »

I've been using Xamarin since mid-2012 and have developed a couple of niche imaging products on Android and iOS for my employer, plus some internal tools on Android.

Overall I've been very happy. Code re-use hasn't been stellar, but good enough to repay the investment. We have re-use not only between apps, but also between mobile apps, Windows desktop apps, and our application backends. I also feel I'm more productive than if I had so swap between Java/Swift/ObjC/Andorid Studio/Xcode.

Stability has improved a lot in the last year. Paid-for support was pretty good (esp. guys like @jonpryor), but the self-serve forums can be a bit hat-and-miss. I never had any killer bugs (but then I never used Xamarin.Forms...)

Overall: 85% happy with Xamarin.

Re: Ask HN: Is Xamarin worth learning?

#109

Post by UK-AL »

glenndebacker wrote: post #54
lanestp wrote: post #35

I've been extremely disappointed in Xamarin. The main issue is that you don't really get code sharing. I would estimate that only 25% of the Xamarin project I manage is cross platform code. The rest is this bizarre merger of native APIs with C#. It's difficult to write because of the lack of examples and documentation. It's also buggy, even with simple things like page views. The real problem is that I can write a na…

"The rest is this bizarre merger of native APIs with C#. " That was the thing that struck me the most when following a Xamarin course. I just don't see the added benefits of Xamarin when you are at that level of using (or having knowledge of) native code.

The UI Code(The stuff that uses these apis) should be a thin layer ontop of the core app.

Re: Ask HN: Is Xamarin worth learning?

#110

Post by Meph504 »

I think where Xamarin shines is in places where the development stack is already .net. If you are starting green pasture, and don't have .net developers already, then it seems to make very little sense.

With that said, I've made a number of apps in it, and it works well enough, but the more abstractions, the more problems, and you want to do anything outside of simple UI apps, you are likely going to have to learn how the native methods work anyway.

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