Microsoft Acquires Xamarin • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin

#291

Post by pistle » Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 5:09 AM UTC

jonsmit wrote: post #38

How much? I know it's undisclosed but it would be very interesting. Hopefully someone leaks it. The rumor was Miguel told MS to "F*#K Off" when MS presented him with an offer many years ago. This lead to CoreCLR being open sourced and Visual Studio Code being built. I'd like to know if by undermining parts of Xamarins business they were able to get them at substantial discount - especially with the tech industry down…

That doesn't sound like the relationship Miguel and Nat have cultivated with .net or MS, and they could have continued on saying "No." Xamarin didn't NEED MS beyond what it already provides openly, everywhere (.net market support both technically + marketing)

I'd almost be surprised if there were previous formal offers as I'm pretty sure the discussions between Miguel and various MS folks, especially Scott Gu, were frank, open, and mostly trusting. You don't throw out formal offers if you have Xamarin openly talking through why they don't feel the time is right.

My take is Miguel and Nat have always been "do right by the technology first." They danced the line with mono and old MS. They then made a compelling step towards where MS would head a few years prior to MS being able to start showing progress in that direction.

Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin

#292

Post by j_s » Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 5:25 AM UTC

moonchrome wrote: post #193

.NET now needs a solid compile-to-browser story - which is presumably coming with some future version of web assembly (initial version doesn't support GC or threads) I'm looking forward to the day where I can ditch C++ for portability - .NET really is an ideal replacement for most apps - you can write apps that don't stress the GC by using value types and can control memory layouts relatively well (unlike Java) and a…

See Bridge.NET, where Saltarelle has gained commercial support under the Apache 2 license. http://bridge.net/

Or pay for DuoCode http://duoco.de/buy or SharpKit http://sharpkit.net/Licensing.aspx (both also available under copyleft-ish licensing).

Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin

#293

Post by jongalloway2 » Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 5:26 AM UTC

hh2222 wrote: post #185

shanselman wrote: post #85

Earlier 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.

Well, .NET has been around for 14 years now. There have been all kinds of worried predictions about Microsoft abandoning or doing evil things with .NET, but after 14 years they're starting to sound a bit less worrying.

Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin

#294

Post by pritambarhate » Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 5:33 AM UTC

It will be interesting to see what happens to RoboVM which allows you to develop iOS and Android application using Java with shared code base. (Similar to what Xamarin does with C#) With third party JavaFX implementation even shared GUI code is possible with RoboVM.

RoboVM was acquired by Xamarin in Oct. 2015 (https://xamarin.com/pr/xamarin-acquires-robovm)

Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin

#295

Post by mistermann » Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 5:37 AM UTC

shanselman wrote: post #85

niels_olson wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or its embrace extend extinguish?

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. ;)

Scott, any word on the inside on whether Excel is going to ever get some major enhancements? The object model desperately needs an improvement, and the ability to write VBA with C# would be spectacular.

Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin

#296

Post by pianoben » Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 6:04 AM UTC

hngiszmo wrote: post #288

shrewduser wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

android youtube and maps were all acquisitions. i think it's confirmation bias you don't really think of all the many successful acquisitions only the bad ones stand out.

those were aquisitions by Google. Now a list of Microsoft:

The Acompli (now Outlook Mobile) acquisition has gone quite nicely so far (source: am on said team). That's just one recent example; there are quite a few MS products that came on board via acquisition.

Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin

#297

Post by pianoben » Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 6:13 AM UTC

avasylev wrote: post #274

Does anyone know if most of Xamarin team located in Boston? The web sites has San Francisco as headquarters, but for some reason I always thought company is mostly in Boston. Curios how much this acquisition increases Microsoft's dev center in Boston.

I remember browsing through their job listings a year or two ago, which gave me the same impression. All of product engineering was in Boston - SF just has sales-type roles.

Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin

#298

Post by jurip » Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 6:27 AM UTC

hngiszmo wrote: post #288

shrewduser wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

android youtube and maps were all acquisitions. i think it's confirmation bias you don't really think of all the many successful acquisitions only the bad ones stand out.

those were aquisitions by Google. Now a list of Microsoft:

The HockeyApp acquisition hasn't caused any pain so far.

Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin

#299

Post by JonD23 » Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 7:04 AM UTC

Today, a pure coincidence to the announcement that Microsoft acquired Xamarin, my brother and I launched a preview into a project that we've been working on for some time now. This is a Xamarin.Forms UI Inspector called XenForms:

http://www.xenforms.com/

Also, in the spirit of giving. I have released an open source version of a game in Xamarin.Forms and CocosSharp. It's a These Crazy Walls Clone.

https://github.com/jonedavis/Xamarin.Forms-With-Cocosharp

Hope someone finds it useful!

Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin

#300

Post by mateuszf » Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 7:06 AM UTC

jongalloway2 wrote: post #293

hh2222 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It worries me more that Microsoft has a track record of abandoning developer tools for the next shiny thing.

Well, .NET has been around for 14 years now. There have been all kinds of worried predictions about Microsoft abandoning or doing evil things with .NET, but after 14 years they're starting to sound a bit less worrying.

Remind me what happened to Silverlight.