I inherited a Xamarin app on one project - and while there were certainly some issues here and there, the promise of native cross-platform app development and shared C# libraries is pretty compelling.

I said a few years ago that this should happen, so glad to see it actually come to pass! http://tmarman.com/Blog/Post/ba9a711f-dcdb-40b5-bca9-ad6eb5b...

This news is important because it solidifies the future of the .Net ecosystem in iOS, OSX, Android, Linux and Windows.

The Xamarin team has been doing a great job, but I am pretty sure that with Microsoft backing them they'll do a way better job.

I am very much hoping that both of these issues are addressed with this acquisition, and like many, I have been holding out for a while now hoping this would happen.

EDIT: pjmlp, can't reply to your comment directly: You are talking about the Indie edition, with which you cannot use Visual Studio. Using Visual Studio requires the professional edition, at $999/platform/year. Even with the discount they gave me, the thousands of dollars I spent just to do hobby projects was a mistake.

I just abandoned it for Ionic after pitching the product to my peers for two years.

Let's just hope that MSFT indeed add it to Visual Studio without any additional costs.

Disclaimer: I have been one of the ones pushing the last 5 years to make that statement true. ;)

It's hard to trust that the currently good sides of MS will be allowed to stay good while other sides of MS are still behaving badly.

There could be many ways to undo the good things MS has done recently, and they are not perfect, but I am much happier the direction in the past year than I have been since the start of the company.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-c...

Noticed how this date is withing those 5 year of "It's a whole new Microsoft" mantra you guys chanting over and over?

Is it even possible for you guys to kill the undead SCO monster now? At any rate, it's still working away.

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.

I would argue that Winforms is now a mature technology and requires little upkeep, but it is still a part of the stack.

WPF development has slowed significantly, but still proceeds.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11167964

I'm sure there are Officially no privacy implications here.

I expect it's done things you (and me) don't like in the past 15 years. However, the same goes for Apple, Google, IBM and Oracle. Microsoft hasn't been the least ethical of that lot.

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

Indeed I was just about to post the following in reply to your comment above:

Please don't add meta commentary about downvotes and who you imagine downvoted you. It's against the HN guidelines (two of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and is invariably tedious.

It seems like they are giving with one hand (open source to developers) and taking with the other (data from their unsuspecting users).

Well, you know, you can't walk into the same Windows twice. (Unless you ignore all updates.)

"The different Microsoft" aspect comes from open sourcing the key technological components so migration away from Microsoft licenses is at least a legally plausible, and that people can indeed see what goes into the sausage.

From developers point of view this is a huge improvement and makes the .Net a much more appealing proposition.

Is a company evil? Does it make good products? To me, at least, it's not very helpful to mix these two discussions.

That's all I know that Xamarin makes, so I think this article is going a bit over my head, but it'll be a shame if I suddenly need a Microsoft account to use it. I do like diversity in my language tooling.

Last I checked, that was just a forked and rebranded Mono Develop with Xamarin's main product line (iOS and Android support for .NET) bundled in.

Xamarin Studio is a swiss army knife. I don't know about your use case, but I use it under the name Monodevelop on linux (not really sure what that association is) and as Xamarin studio on windows. For my use case, it's a C# and C++ IDE for desktop development, same as visual studio.

It's certainly not a MacOS only product, it supports all three platforms including windows.

Mono only supports a subset of the whole stack.

No sane .NET developer would use Mono on Windows, its purpose is .NET portability to other OSes.

WHY ARE WE ARGUING?

explodes

Poor guy. His name autocorrects to one of the best-known names in computing.

Several years before that purchase, Stephen Elop (an MS executive) became CEO of Nokia. Within 6 months of his hire, Nokia signed an agreement with MS to sell Windows Phone devices; the classic Symbian OS and the Linux-based Meego - both of which had shipping hardware - were canceled in favor of exclusive focus on Windows Phone. Within the next few years, Nokia laid off over 20k people, their stock dropped by about 85%, and they even sold and then leased back their HQ in Finland. They were a lot less successful by that point, and a lot less expensive to purchase. Which Microsoft did.

There was some amount of controversy associated with the above.

Although technically MeeGo had no shipping hardware at the time. The N900 ran Maemo, the first (and sadly only) MeeGo hardware to ship to the public was the N9 which didn't ship until months after the "burning platform" announcement

Can't see why. It's obvious Microsoft perfected executive outplacement as an offensive weapon.

MS licensed their patents, but the current profitable Nokia kept them and has a unit dedicated to research and IP.

One can argue that the licensing was cheap, but cross-licensing agreements between companies is very common.

Extend with proprietary functionality

Extinguish the competition

The competition for .Net isn't Xamarin. It's the Java platform.

You either die a developer or live long enough to see yourself become the manager?