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Microsoft Acquires Xamarin

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Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin

#311

Post by mixedCase »

coldtea wrote: post #140
systems wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"if the open source community is so great" if.. i dont see how they can be an if .. it is 100% absolutely great .. with all the great FOSS projects around, how much more evidence do you need

It's because I've been around for a while. The idea, and failed promise, of FOSS wasn't that there will be many "great FOSS projects around", it was that it will win the desktop (and not just as some FOSS released by some corporate behemoth, but by community -bazaar- FOSS projects). That, it never did. And in fact, in all those years, they've failed to even better Photoshop (Gimp is still far behind), MS Office (Open…

LibreOffice is a better MS Office in many regards. I'll give you Adobe tools, but Krita is better than Photoshop for people doing mostly tablet art and you've brought up Gimp in a transition period, where they're doing a huge rewrite to support GLSL that allows them to extend their codebase a whole lot where previously it was not possible.

Also GTK is a toolkit firmly linked to Gnome. The best toolkit currently available for Linux is Qt, and it's also cross-platform and integrates well with all desktops and operating systems it supports.

Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin

#312

Post by jongalloway2 »

mateuszf wrote: post #300
jongalloway2 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Silverlight was essentially a polyfill for back when browsers weren't very capable. I did a ton of work with Silverlight - streaming video, vector graphics, cross-platform front-end apps with back-end integration... all stuff that was pretty hard to do back then, but is now widely available in all modern browsers.

Also, both the JavaScript language and runtime were pretty hard to build reliable, performant apps in back when Silverlight was introduced. The JavaScript language and runtimes have matured considerably since then.

If it had been my say, I'd have kept it for a little longer than they did, but by now I'd say it's no longer necessary.

There were always two camps in the Silverlight world, both inside and outside of Microsoft: those that saw it as a way to make browser-based applications more awesome, and those that saw Silverlight as a way to get away from that yucky HTML/CSS/JS dev. I was always firmly in the first camp, and from that side of things I wouldn't take back a minute I spent on Silverlight dev - I got a jump on video, vector graphics, browser-based apps, etc., long before it was practical to do that in the browser. When those technologies hit mainstream browsers, great!

Note: Microsoft employee but definitely only speaking for myself here.

Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin

#313

Post by knocte »

kodablah wrote: post #289
knocte wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need. The future is WebAssembly. We just need C#/F# compilers that generate this new IL.

https://github.com/WebAssembly/ilwasm - Of course WebAssembly being still in the design stage, this is probably not very usable.

nice!

Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin

#314

Post by teh_klev »

enraged_camel wrote: post #92
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. ;)

>>Nonsense. The last 5 years show it's a whole new Microsoft Yeah, that's why Windows 10 sends all your data to Microsoft by default and Windows updates no longer come with detailed explanations of what is in them. /s edit: judging by the downvotes, there's a surprising number of Microsoft fanboys here. I guess all they had to do to win people over was make a few token contributions to the open-source community...

> judging by the downvotes, there's a surprising number of Microsoft fanboys here.

Seriously, do we need to lower the content level of discussion here to "fanboy" camp accusations, it's not productive.

Also, please review the guidelines:

Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downvote you or announce that you expect to get downvoted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin

#315

Post by teh_klev »

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.

I'd counter that by stating that I work on a .NET codebase that dates back to 2003, it still builds just fine in Visual Studio 2015 and runs without issue on .NET 4.6/IIS8.5.

Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin

#316

Post by tallanvor »

mateuszf wrote: post #300
jongalloway2 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Silverlight was competition to Flash. Once the standards were far enough along that it was clear plugins weren't going to be necessary, there was no reason to keep it alive. Honestly, you should be happy that Microsoft killed off theirs and decided to use open standards instead.

Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin

#317

Post by insulanian »

fapjacks wrote: post #131
insulanian wrote: post #128

What this means for MonoDevelop? Will it stagnate and die, or florish with fresh water from Microsoft's wells? What will be THE tool to develop for/on Linux?

C

> What will be THE tool to develop for/on Linux?

I meant it in .NET context.

Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin

#318

Post by ghuntley »

iLoch wrote: post #164
nshung wrote: post #151

Do apps written in C# with Xamarin perform better than those written in React Native? What are the differences?

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.

Wrong, Xamarin has continuous/live coding. If you're doing the code -> compile -> deploy -> watch dance then you're doing it wrong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lH90fVkXQx8

Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin

#319

Post by timlyo »

qntmfred wrote: post #198
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.

seems to me, the next shiny thing is what HN is all about

There's a difference between a news site full of nerds being interested in something shiny, and a company dropping an old product for something shiny.

Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin

#320

Post by ghuntley »

kristianp wrote: post #259
moonchrome wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 platfo…

Xamarin has continuous/live coding. If you're doing the code -> compile -> deploy -> watch dance then you're doing it wrong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lH90fVkXQx8

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