> > There are some interesting comments to this post; not unexpectedly, > reflecting (for one example) Greg Keogh’s reticence in adopting it at its > cost for effective development by in dependent developers. And its efficacy. >
I have some updates on this. After several months of research, evaluation and demos, we're about to embark upon a rewrite of a large Silverlight app using Xamarin to target tablets. As I complained last year, overcoming the quirks and environmental problems with Xamarin, and learning just what it can and can't do is a process that will leave you nearly drained of the will to live. Once you get over the hurdles though and learn to work with it and not against it, it's probably better than using native kits. I know people who run a purely native app business and they have a terrible time finding staff or contractors who are competent in Android and iOS development with the native kits, and to find someone who does both is rarer than a lottery win. They have one prize developer is who is competent at both and he's teaching the other. They wrote a demo for us last year and it brings home the stark reality that they had to write the demo app twice, completely, with no shared code at all. I have the code here, and the Java and Objective-C (not Swift) code is weird and incomprehensible. Lord help anyone who has to write and maintain parallel apps like this. So that's the obvious selling point ... C#, familiar libraries, XAML, shared code. Love it or hate it, Xamarin is probably the better alternative overall for .netty for people like us. The large Xamarin community with good documentation is another selling point, in comparison to Firemonkey for example, which is viable, but we only found two people on the Embarcadero forums who had even vague experience with it. Technically I should also point out that the development experience seems more stable when using Xamarin Studio on iOS, which is irritating because a big selling point is the Visual Studio integration. On an iMac you can drive the emulator and build process more directly and reliably, but then you can't target Windows. So it's give and take. Switching between Visual Studio and Xamarin Studio will drive you to keystroke and shortcut insanity. I will also watch with fascination how this takeover goes. *Greg K*
