NativeScript with Universal Windows Platform Support
1–10 of 14 posts
Re: NativeScript with Universal Windows Platform Support
#2Do yourself a favor and use C# or even C++\Cx instead. They're both a much better fit for XAML.
Full disclosure: I work at Microsoft on XAML UI in C++. It's nice. Opinions are my own.
Re: NativeScript with Universal Windows Platform Support
#3Do yourself a favor and use C# or even C++\Cx instead. They're both a much better fit for XAML. Full disclosure: I work at Microsoft on XAML UI in C++. It's nice. Opinions are my own.
But what if I also need to target iOS and Android? Isn't that the problem NativeScript is trying to solve?
Re: NativeScript with Universal Windows Platform Support
#4Do yourself a favor and use C# or even C++\Cx instead. They're both a much better fit for XAML. Full disclosure: I work at Microsoft on XAML UI in C++. It's nice. Opinions are my own.
But what if I also need to target iOS and Android? Isn't that the problem NativeScript is trying to solve?
I'd still choose to use C++ or C# for cross-platform code if starting from scratch.
However, I've never had to work on cross-platform apps, and have never been subjected to JavaScript professionally, so my opinion is probably worthless.
Re: NativeScript with Universal Windows Platform Support
#5Earlier quoted context omitted.
But what if I also need to target iOS and Android? Isn't that the problem NativeScript is trying to solve?
I'd still choose to use C++ or C# for cross-platform code if starting from scratch. However, I've never had to work on cross-platform apps, and have never been subjected to JavaScript professionally, so my opinion is probably worthless.
Xamarin would probably be the framework/tool of choice if you want C#. Other than that, most (popular) cross-platform app development frameworks I've found do use JavaScript. "Disclaimer": I'm in the middle of writing a thesis on the subject.
Re: NativeScript with Universal Windows Platform Support
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
But what if I also need to target iOS and Android? Isn't that the problem NativeScript is trying to solve?
I'd still choose to use C++ or C# for cross-platform code if starting from scratch. However, I've never had to work on cross-platform apps, and have never been subjected to JavaScript professionally, so my opinion is probably worthless.
So why did you say C# and C+= are a much better fit for XAML? Because they're the languages that Microsoft officially supports? Any other reasons?
Re: NativeScript with Universal Windows Platform Support
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd still choose to use C++ or C# for cross-platform code if starting from scratch. However, I've never had to work on cross-platform apps, and have never been subjected to JavaScript professionally, so my opinion is probably worthless.
So why did you say C# and C+= are a much better fit for XAML? Because they're the languages that Microsoft officially supports? Any other reasons?
Official support, documentation, perf (presumably), debugging, and tooling support would be my main concerns.
Technically, XAML makes heavy use of C#'s events and properties (which C++\Cx adds to C++), which don't exist in plain old JavaScript. Also, both C# and C++\Cx support "await" natively, which is extremely nice for WinRT's async-heavy API's.
Re: NativeScript with Universal Windows Platform Support
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd still choose to use C++ or C# for cross-platform code if starting from scratch. However, I've never had to work on cross-platform apps, and have never been subjected to JavaScript professionally, so my opinion is probably worthless.
Xamarin would probably be the framework/tool of choice if you want C#. Other than that, most (popular) cross-platform app development frameworks I've found do use JavaScript. "Disclaimer": I'm in the middle of writing a thesis on the subject.
Since you're writing a thesis on cross-platform frameworks, have you looked at the toolchain that Google used for Inbox? They write their cross-platform non-UI code in Java. On Android, that's native. For iOS, they compile it to Objective-C using a tool they wrote called J2ObjC. For the browser app, they use GWT. The UI code is platform-specific and written in each platform's native language, i.e. Java, ObjC, and JS. They don't even try for cross-platform UI code, as Ray Cromwell explained here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8965349
This toolchain doesn't cover UWP, except indirectly via UWP's support for web apps.
Re: NativeScript with Universal Windows Platform Support
#9Small recommendation for folks looking to use JS for Windows development (I understand this is just a runtime, but people may be inclined to combine these two things): do not use WinJS for any reason. It's undoubtably the worst UI "framework" I've ever used. Completely inflexible (HTML and styles defined in private and inaccessible methods, swallows events, monolithic functions) and riddled with bugs and incomplete features. Really surprised it's an official Microsoft project. I don't mean to disparage the developers of it, but it's really bad. Don't use it if you value your time or peace of mind and plan on customizing it in any meaningful way.
Re: NativeScript with Universal Windows Platform Support
#10I have started to develop mobile applications with NativeScript and I am absolute in love with it. It has an Angular feel to it (I despise all things React). Before, I had only been doing backend work and I still have only taken care of the Web API portion of our NS app, but I hope to do some GUI soon. I am extremely impressed by NS.