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Ask HN: Is Xamarin worth learning?

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Re: Ask HN: Is Xamarin worth learning?

#161

Post by V-2 »

JamesBarney wrote: post #145
V-2 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you statement is true when people tried to follow MVVM with a religious zeal. In my experience WPF/MVVM worked far better for people who took a more pragmatic approach to the code behind. I always found that WPF/MVVM made the 90% use case really easy, and the 10% use case ridiculously hard. So I usually used MVVM for the 90% case, and the code behind for 10% case. People I know who shared this philosophy with…

That may be true, but what does it tell you? To me it shows that the implementation is lacking, if people need to sidestep the pattern on a regular basis, and are actually better off by doing so.

It also introduces inconsistencies - in similar scenario, one dev will already prefer resorting to code behind, another one won't. Plus, testability gets tricky and messy when some of the behaviour can be verified by testing the viewmodels, some can't, and some is actually split over two layers.

All of this at least partially invalidates the benefits MVVM architecture was supposed to bring about in the first place.

Also note that WPF was sort of neglected: it hardly ever evolved over the years.

Ghanhi, when asked what he thought of Western civilization, famously replied that it might be a good idea. I guess the same could be said for WPF : )

Re: Ask HN: Is Xamarin worth learning?

#163

Post by motola »

rogihee wrote: post #97
grezql wrote: post #77

Xamarin Native developer here, I started off by trying to create a Pokemon Go Map app. Although I got off to a quick start, slowly it downed upon me that I started spending too much time finding fixes for Xamarin issues rather that programming. I used macbook as agent and visual studio as IDE. Sometimes the deployment would take 5 minutes! I then had to restart the agent to fix it. As a programmer I am rather a perso…

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.

I agree

Re: Ask HN: Is Xamarin worth learning?

#164

Post by Ryuuke »

grezql wrote: post #77

Xamarin Native developer here, I started off by trying to create a Pokemon Go Map app. Although I got off to a quick start, slowly it downed upon me that I started spending too much time finding fixes for Xamarin issues rather that programming. I used macbook as agent and visual studio as IDE. Sometimes the deployment would take 5 minutes! I then had to restart the agent to fix it. As a programmer I am rather a perso…

I had exactly the same experience with Xamarin.Droid, even though I'm mainly a C# developer, for android app development, i'll go with Java & intellij Idea.

Re: Ask HN: Is Xamarin worth learning?

#165

Post by zerr »

grezql wrote: post #77

Xamarin Native developer here, I started off by trying to create a Pokemon Go Map app. Although I got off to a quick start, slowly it downed upon me that I started spending too much time finding fixes for Xamarin issues rather that programming. I used macbook as agent and visual studio as IDE. Sometimes the deployment would take 5 minutes! I then had to restart the agent to fix it. As a programmer I am rather a perso…

The only selling point for Xamarin for me is Xaramin.Forms, but so far neither this has a good reputation.

Re: Ask HN: Is Xamarin worth learning?

#166

Post by tonypp »

zerr wrote: post #165
grezql wrote: post #77

Xamarin Native developer here, I started off by trying to create a Pokemon Go Map app. Although I got off to a quick start, slowly it downed upon me that I started spending too much time finding fixes for Xamarin issues rather that programming. I used macbook as agent and visual studio as IDE. Sometimes the deployment would take 5 minutes! I then had to restart the agent to fix it. As a programmer I am rather a perso…

The only selling point for Xamarin for me is Xaramin.Forms, but so far neither this has a good reputation.

As a person who's used XF for the last 2 years in my company, stay away from Xamarin.Forms. I can see some of the appeal for the regular Xamarin.iOS and .Droid but the performance of Xamarin.Forms on Android is absolutely horrible even after optimizing it to an insane amount. Think several seconds render times per page on a Nexus 5X (on a page that takes 200ms if written using Xamarin Android).

They've been denying it's a problem for over a year, and then acknowledged it a few months ago and did nothing about it.

The platform itself also harbors a lot of bizarre and difficult bugs that only cause a couple of crashes each under some very specific conditions that are nearly impossible repro consistently. But there are so many of them that on a given day, 5% of our apps will crash or freeze because of some Garbage Collector bug, a platform bug, or some platform race condition. Just check how many of the bugzilla bugs are still in the NEW state.

Re: Ask HN: Is Xamarin worth learning?

#167

Post by tonypp »

m_fayer wrote: post #75

My experience with Xamarin is mostly on the Android side, so that's what I'll mention. Spoiler: mostly positive, with some big caveats. In no particular order: Stay the hell away from Xam.Forms, unless it's improved drastically in the last 6 months. Though I also think the whole idea is misguided. For Android, go with Xamarin or Kotlin. I would take C# over Kotlin because of the maturity of the language, the tooling…

I will re-iterate the "Stay the hell away from Xam.Forms" as we've used it at work for almost 1.5 years.

I just convinced our management to move away from it when I migrated a page from Xamarin.Forms to regular Xamarin.Android. The page render time went from 2,000ms to 400ms.

A quick glance on the now-open source code of Xamarin Forms now shows you why the perf is so sluggish (the whole thing seems like it was hacked together by a college intern as a week-end project).

Xamarin seems to have a marketing team that is far ahead of their development team.

Re: Ask HN: Is Xamarin worth learning?

#168

Post by zihotki »

cryptarch wrote: post #83

I've very recently worked with Xamarin Forms for about 5 full-time months and it was terrible. My main complaints are: * It's full of bugs * The build system is unreliable and mysteriously breaks, which generally takes a full day to fix * Basic functionality such as merging resource dictionaries (which are stylesheets, kinda) is missing * No graphical UI designer or preview, so every layout change requires a recompil…

Actually they've released Xamarin Forms Previewer - https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/xamarin-forms/xaml/xaml... It's still a bit buggy but does the job in most cases. Also the latest version of Xamarin is way more stable.
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