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Ask HN: Is Xamarin worth learning?

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Re: Ask HN: Is Xamarin worth learning?

#81

Post by macns »

martinpinto wrote: post #4

Ionic 2 is a very promising hybrid approach. It's still in beta but should be out of it soon (better wait until it's released). The current beta version is quite fast. It has lots of components which are beautiful and has great support for ios, android and windows phone. It's JS (angular2) and html based.

Can you please point to an app built on this? I'm currently looking into hybrid apps and Ionic is probably the best option. It may be fast but not smooth though, e.g when scrolling or pulling a left side menu.

Re: Ask HN: Is Xamarin worth learning?

#82

Post by hitgeek »

i'm mostly a web developer with C# and JS. I've tried to learn Swift, Xamarin and React Native multiple times over the last 2 years.

With both Xamarin and React Native there was a honeymoon period where everything seemed so easy and great. But at some point I always hit a problem where there was limited documentation, or unsupported features, and that really hurt my productivity and motivation.

The learning curve for Swift/ObjC always seemed much higher, with a lot more upfront investment required before I could make anything resembling a functional app. The iOS layout system in particular was an obstacle, as well as managing the tooling and dev environments.

If I had a free 6 months, I would just learn full native, but keep an eye on React Native. The dev experience in React Native is unparalleled, and it seems easy to drop down to native code (assuming you know it). Also the ability to easily contribute back to the community with NPM and react-native "link", makes me hopeful limitations will quickly be erased.

Re: Ask HN: Is Xamarin worth learning?

#83

Post by cryptarch »

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 recompile and deploy before you can see it

* Apps feel sluggish and crash at runtime without specific error messages

* It makes VS crash all the time. I'm not a regular VS user so I'm not sure if VS:CE2015 is a POS or if Xamarin is.

Re: Ask HN: Is Xamarin worth learning?

#85

Post by eonil »

Such cross platform apps are meaningful only if your product doesn't need great UX. But the question is, if your app doesn't need it, why do you need a native app? It's better sticking to a web-app. Make a web-app and cover all platforms at once.

Re: Ask HN: Is Xamarin worth learning?

#86

Post by xeromal »

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.

I've been doing Xamarin for about 6 months and I get most of me reuse in services. Sure, manipulating the UI is mostly native code but the rest can be reused such as the DB layer, API layer, and anywhere else you have business logic.

Re: Ask HN: Is Xamarin worth learning?

#87

Post by ceeK »

hobofan wrote: post #79
ceeK wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard performance problems.

The only performance problems I've seen were created by people who don't understand when React triggers a redraw, thus rerendering a 1MB image on every keyboard keystroke. As long of you are a bit mindeful of the big pitfalls (any bigger framework has some of those), the performance of React-Native is excellent.

According to discord (https://discord.engineering/using-react-native-one-year-late...):

  Unfortunately Android devices have much 
  greater variance in performance and tend to trail significantly behind iOS. 
  We were able to get our app running fairly quickly, 
  but the performance — specifically on touch events was not at an acceptable level even on higher end devices. 
  In addition at that early stage there was still a lot missing in the React Native Android feature-set that would
  have made getting our prototype to production level more time consuming than our iOS effort.
This was posted on the 7th June admittedly. Does this still hold true?

Re: Ask HN: Is Xamarin worth learning?

#88

Post by talkingtab »

ak1394 wrote: post #74
FlyingSnake wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've not tried RN, but a team I know tried it for a professional project. They were really dissatisfied with it said it's not suited for medium to heavy applications and found the performance sorely lacking. IIRC they mentioned that the toolchain is also not as great as Android Studio/Xcode. But YMMV.

I've several React Native apps in both appstores. I think while React Native is not suited for all types of apps, there is a sweet spot for certain projects where it really shines. The development speed is really unparalleled, with hot reloading you can see your app changes as soon as you hit 'save' in your editor.

what is the sweet spot? I'm faced with developing a fairly simple thing and it would help to know a little more about learning curve ( I use react ), downsides, etc.

Re: Ask HN: Is Xamarin worth learning?

#89

Post by eonil »

king_magic wrote: post #56
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…

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?

Re: Ask HN: Is Xamarin worth learning?

#90

Post by xeromal »

dep_b wrote: post #24
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.

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.
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