I wouldn't be surprised if they followed this up with a purchase of Unity3d ...
Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
251–260 of 405 posts
Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
#252Is it just me, or does it ring of the shrill sighs of relief from C# developers who have been watching their platform decline in here?
Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
...Xamarin studio isn't a competitor to Visual Studio? That's all I know that Xamarin makes, so I think this article is going a bit over my head, but it'll be a shame if I suddenly need a Microsoft account to use it. I do like diversity in my language tooling.
Ask them about Alan Truing - he kept his work secret so should have had his career ruined by the likes of you.
> Alan Truing
Poor guy. His name autocorrects to one of the best-known names in computing.
Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
#254Xamarin bought by Microsoft two days after Skype for Linux can't join calls by new clients. Oh yeah. The future is bright. Just not for the Linux desktop pieces of Mono.
Desktop Linux was, is, and will probably always be a niche thing. And if the open source community is so great, as some of its proponents argue, let them build their own Skype. The non desktop pieces of Mono should be getting lots of improvements, though.
If the closed-source world is so great, let it build an equivalent to the Internet without any of the open pieces the Internet relies on.
Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
That makes no sense. It's pretty clear that .NET is Microsoft's future, and Xamarin extends the reach of .NET.
Look at Winforms, WPF and Silverlight. They are all .Net and all abandoned. I wouldn't bet my long term future on Xamarin.
Yes, Silverlight has been abandoned.
I would argue that Winforms is now a mature technology and requires little upkeep, but it is still a part of the stack.
WPF development has slowed significantly, but still proceeds.
Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're thinking of old Microsoft. New Microsoft is all about Azure, the walled gardens of windows is slowly being left behind. Take a look at .NET Core.
Take a look at DX12, WPF, etc. The walled garden is still there and getting worse, they're just sacrificing their other markets.
You are talking about destkop technologies that are necessarily tied with their desktop offering. When it comes to the backend/server side of things, Microsoft has making huge pushes to open source/extend their tools so that they can be used in other operating systems (mainly Linux.) My belief is they realize that the war for the server OS is kind of lost already, so they might as well offer tools that everyone can use on any of the many cloud platforms out there, while providing good tooling for their own PaaS solutions and make their money that way.
Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
#257Scary. Xamarin sells tools to support multi-platform app development. Microsoft would want that only to the extent that it assisted migration to Microsoft platforms. Not away from them.
Can't speak for what they intend to do, but current moves by Microsoft seem to be very much on the contrary direction of assisting migration or locking down existing citizens of their platform: Visual Studio Code, Roslyn (C# compiler), TypeScript, those are all cross-plaftorm. Not to mention the ones that are getting there, like ChakraCore (JS Engine). Still having a hard time understanding the new Microsoft, but so…
Since I first heard about CoreClr (or whatever they were calling it initially - .NET Core?), I've been thinking that they are gunning to displace Java, which is looking increasingly sad in comparison to C#.
Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nonsense. The last 5 years show it's a whole new Microsoft. Disclaimer: I have been one of the ones pushing the last 5 years to make that statement true. ;)
It worries me more that Microsoft has a track record of abandoning developer tools for the next shiny thing.
This is exactly what pushed me to the Apple ecosystem.
Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
React Native applications will be faster to develop thanks to React being inherently fast to develop. I would expect a React Native app to perform the same or better than Xamarin, due to React Native's asynchronous bridge approach. I don't have data to back this up, though.
JS apps being faster to develop than C# ? Maybe prototype, but .NET/C# are superior dev platforms in every way.
I think the reasoning behind this is that react allows you to almost instantly see the result of code changes in your app. With c# you have to wait minutes for each build and deployment cycle, which is painful.
In terms of runtime performance, I guess in theory c# should be faster than javascript, but it depends on a lot of things, like the program being run, the speed of the mono runtime on the android or IOS platform being used, etc.
Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
#260As my man jeff spicoli would've said, "Awesome, totally awesome"