Go Xamarin it's the best! (Opinion may be bias www.michaelridland.com) Traditional Xamarin (Native API) as the platform is awesome and solid and fast, the IDE and some of the tools around it can be a bit buggy. Xamarin.Forms is pretty early, and can be frustrating but I have build some XPlat app pretty rapidly with it.
Actually I'm doing a 'Introduction to Xamarin' at SydMobile in a few weeks, you should come along I'd love to answer any questions you have. http://www.meetup.com/SydMobile/ Below is a unpublished blog post on why you should use Xamarin... *Should I use Xamarin for Mobile Development? YES you should!* In my opinion you'd be insane if you didn't use Xamarin for mobile development. Many people don't know what they're missing out on by not using Xamarin so I'm going to highlight some reasons I think people should be using Xamarin. 1) It's Native but with 80%+ code share? So for those that aren't aware of Xamarin or how it works, Xamarin allows you to develop apps for iOS, Android and Mac from a single code base. When I say this I don't mean in a webview or customised API, it actually usesthe Native APIs. So when developing you use UITableView which is the same API that a native developer would be using. 2) C# and F# are Modern languages C# might not be the hipster language of the year it is a continually evolving language with solid features like type interference, dynamic types, language integrated query (LINQ), async/await and first class functions. C# is designed for developing large robust applications. And for the functional types there's F#, which from what I've been told it's like scala but faster and better thought out. I'd argue they're better languages than java, javascript and objective-c... and seeing that they're currently the only languages with built in async you could say their even better than swift... 3) async/await .. 'wait but javascript is all async' i hear you say... C#/F# async/await is different to what people normally think async is. C#/F# async/await tackles the callback hell problems in rich clients, anyone who works with rich clients will know of these problems. This is a problem that's attempted to be solved with promises and generators but neither are at the level of async/await. Here's a little before/after sample: *Before:* doAsync1(function () { doAsync2(function () { doAsync3(function () { doAsync4(function () { }) }) }) }) *After:* await doAsync1() await doAsync2() await doAsync3() await doAsync4() 4) Watches, Google Glass wearables and the future of devices. In case you haven't noticed the future isn't just mobiles it's wearables, devices and IOT. Xamarin has same day support for all these platforms including android wear, google glass, Amazon TV and more. As I've said beforeXamarin uses the Native APIs and compiles down to native so using Xamarin you're in the perfect position develop all modern platforms. 5) It's ready now! All the time I hear people say 'html is a fast moving target' or 'it will get there eventually'. Xamarin is here now, it's Native and it's cross platform. Why wait to have a great app when you can have it now and as a bonus know that your application is future proof for future devices. 6) It's fast and stable >From personal experience the Xamarin traditional (Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android) platform is solid, fast and stable. You'd be hard pressed to find a problem with the core parts of the platform, any app bugs will probably be your own bugs. 7) Documentation The documentation for Xamarin is solid, it's generally better than the Apple and Android documentation. 8) Xamarin.Forms So how about 100% codeshare and still be Native? Xamarin.Forms allows you to program against a single API and have that single API mapped to native controls on each platform. Hanselman describes it well, 'Write Once Run Everywhere AND Be Native'. It's still early days for the product but the top component developers like Telerik and DevExpress are already developing components for Xamarin.Forms. 9) It's the best of all worlds (Hybrid and Native) If you've taken a look at my Xamarin mashup blog <http://www.michaelridland.com/mobile/asp-net-mvc-xamarin-mashups/> you'd already know that the possibilities with Xamarin are vast, you can essential create your own Cordova and you can completely integrate it with your C# Mvvm/c# Native Code. So you have the full power of the .net framework to build your client application architecture which becomes very useful when you have complex requirements like Offline. 10) Large Community Xamarin uses the .net framework and because of this it's inherited the pre-existing community, this means that even though it's a fairly new platform we already have support for Awesome projects like Json.net, Fody and ReactiveExtensions/ReactiveUI. 11) Profitable Innovative Company Xamarin as a company has a passion for enabling mobile developers to deliver leading experiences. Their products cost money Yes but it's good for us, I see many people complain about the pricing but Xamarin charging money for products allows them to put money back into building amazing products for us. This year at EvolveXamarin released some great new products, a Analytics Cloud Service, a faster Android emulator and a performance profiler. In the future Xamarin is on the rise and this means our tools are only going to get better and better. This is why I choose Xamarin and I think you should too.... If you have any questions regarding Xamarin or need any help please contact me I'm always happy to help. Thanks On Fri, Oct 24, 2014 at 2:58 PM, Stuart Kinnear <[email protected]> wrote: > I've got a bit of free time so I'm starting to play around with mobile > development and getting somewhat bewildered with the options offered. > > The dream is to knock up a business style app that will allow persistence > of data to the local database eg. sqlite then a transfer to a base server. > > Looked at Android dev kit, and that is OK but of course that strikes out > Ios & Windows. > > Looked at PhoneGap/Cordova and got infuriated by the simple task of > posting data (jsonp is a bit of a security risk in my books) > > Early last year I did play with Xamarin and found it unstable, crashing at > a whim. Is it worth giving it another go, or should I just suck it up and > work on platform specific development tools. > > -- > > ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Stuart Kinnear > Mobile: 040 704 5686. Office: 03 9589 6502 > > SK Pro-Active! Pty Ltd > acn. 81 072 778 262 > PO Box 6082 Cromer, Vic 3193. Australia > > Business software developers. > SQL Server, Visual Basic, C# , Asp.Net, Microsoft Office. > > ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- >
