FWIW: 64 bit edit and continue is in VS2013. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Fredericks, Chris Sent: Monday, 1 July 2013 9:32 PM To: ozDotNet Subject: RE: HTML5 capabilities
There is the development environment licensing activation and checking, but I don't believe there are any run-time licensing checks. Xamarin obtained a perpetual license to all of the intellectual property of Mono, MonoTouch, Mono for Android and Mono for Visual Studio, and by buying Xamarin.Mac, Xamarin.iOS or Xamarin.Android I believe you are buying the right to a GPL free version of the runtime for the corresponding platform. I contacted Xamarin support and the response I got from their runtime engineers is that Xamarin "have absolutely no DRM at all in any of our runtimes!" From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Nathan Chere Sent: Monday, 1 July 2013 12:03 PM To: ozDotNet Subject: RE: HTML5 capabilities Let's say you want to use Visual Studio and target at least 2 platforms (Android and iOS). I would expect that's the most common scenario. That's $2,000 per developer. Not pocket change at all. Also assuming even 'Indies' much less professionals would often be at least two developers, it doesn't take much imagination to see a ~$5,000+ investment. If you're comparing to Visual Studio Ultimate then you should also be comparing to Xamarin's Enterprise licenses which is then $4,000 per developer to target 2 platforms, ON TOP of your Visual Studio etc licenses. Unless you're a solo "Indie" developer who is content to use Xamarin Studio and only targeting one platform, it's expensive - which isn't a measure of price alone but what you're getting for your money. Regardless, my primary objection to Xamarin isn't the cost. It's the licensing baked into the run-time. I've been burnt too many times by frameworks with licensing checks when they're no longer supported (or are supported half-arsedly from the outset - eg Marmalade) If Xamarin would release their MonoDroid/MonoTouch/etc frameworks without the DRM (or at least move it solely to the development environment instead of run-time) it would be a different story but as it stands I refuse to make any significant investment in such an ecosystem again and would encourage others to avoid it for the same reasons. I also consider their track record for transparency about feature roadmaps and timelines. Xamarin are great at talking about what they've already released, not so great about what's coming up and feature requests. Not that Microsoft are perfect but other than for a few stand-out examples (eg XNA, x64 edit-and-continue now 8-9 years and counting) they're pretty good considering the scope of what they offer. There's also a much better community around Visual Studio which fills in a lot of the gaps when Microsoft drops the ball which Xamarin Studio simply doesn't have - another consideration in determining how 'expensive' it is (Resharper anyone?). An alternative to consider is PhoneGap. In keeping with the tradition of spontaneous statistics, I'd guess maybe 80-90% of the things people are using Mono for could be just as effectively done with PhoneGap and still give the benefit of cross-platform 'native' apps with very minimal learning curve compared to learning Objective-C, Java etc. And it's free. If you're writing a typical app and not relying on anything like MonoGame over the top of Mono, I think the trade-off of using Javascript instead of C# for the client is minor and well worth it. From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Stephen Price Sent: Monday, 1 July 2013 11:17 AM To: ozDotNet Subject: Re: HTML5 capabilities I disagree that it is expensive. Visual Studio Ultimate is expensive. Xamarin is a tenth of the cost, and comparable with other vendors. Telerik for example. Oh you wanted Free? You could just write for all three of those platforms manually, and learn each different platform's syntax. (something I decided NOT to do some years ago, for the want of not spreading my knowledge too thin an becoming a jack of all trades, master of none.) Personally, I'd grab the Free version (that they do have), play with that until you get a feel if its going to fit the bill. (you never really know until you take it for a spin). Then upgrade and consider it an investment. You are a software developer and you need tools. If you were a carpenter, would you skimp on spending $1000 on your carpentry tools? Would you buy the crappy cheap tools or get the higher priced tools, knowing the quality of your work will be that much better? Fill your toolbox with quality tools. On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 9:08 AM, Stephen Price <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Looks interesting. Testing would be a pain, you'd need to have a device of each platform. Oh wait. I already do. :) On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 8:21 AM, Fredericks, Chris <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: +1 for Xamarin - Full native code, cross platform development for Windows, Android, iOS and Mac OS X in C#. From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> [mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>] On Behalf Of Michael Ridland Sent: Monday, 1 July 2013 9:51 AM To: ozDotNet Subject: Re: HTML5 capabilities Hi Greg We've spent the last 18 months building a mobile version of our ERP software @ www.happen.biz<http://www.happen.biz>. About 9 months of that was using html5 which we pushed to it's limits but in the end it just wasn't 'good' enough, by good enough I mean primarily fast enough. We tried out Xamarin and never looked back, we now have a rock solid mobile app which is fast and sexy. So my opinion is Xamarin Rocks. Great for c# teams. Grids, splitters, trees, drag-and-drop, animated charts - well this doesn't work on mobile devices anyway, you actually need to rethink a users interaction with your software, and rethink, and rethink. You need to also spend alot of time using other high quality mobile apps to see different ways a user can interact with your app. On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 9:16 AM, Craig van Nieuwkerk <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Have you considered Xamarin? Native applications written in C# www.xamarin.com<http://www.xamarin.com> On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 9:11 AM, Greg Keogh <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Folks, a few times over the last year I've raised the topic of writing browser based applications that can reach the most mobile devices with the least coding effort. Sadly we learned (from the replies) that there is no easy road. It looks like you have to "go native" in Object C or Java, or use HTML5 and accept reduced functionality. All of these options are a rather frightening for us because we only have C++ and C# skills in the group and we'll have to hire specialists or undergo intense training. A colleague using the latest Borland C++ kits says it has a product called Prism which claims to target different platforms with a common code base. I said that sounds like black magic, but my colleague is so busy that he hasn't had time yet to evaluate Prism. A quick search hints that Prism is actually Oxygene<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_Prism>, which would take us down a completely different road. So this leaves us with the optional of HTML5 ... but we're wondering just what it can and can't do. Is it possible to write a "real application" in HTML5, with grids, splitters, trees, drag-and-drop, animated charts, etc. I find it hard to believe that HTML5 could reproduce this functionality in our Silverlight 5 app. Can anyone here explain just what HTML5 is capable or incapable of doing? Cheers, Greg K Click here<https://www.mailcontrol.com/sr/MZbqvYs5QwJvpeaetUwhCQ==> to report this email as spam. This message has been scanned for malware by Websense. www.websense.com<http://www.websense.com/>
