Xamarin is not about Xamarin Studio. It's about the iOS and Android runtimes. Thanks to its ability to take full advantage of AOT compilation, the performance difference is staggering compared to Mono. Also it needs to JIT in less situations, which is a big plus on iOS since JITing is prohibited on that platform "for security reasons".
It is bad enough that you have to keep a Mac around with XCode on it to build any iOS apps now.
> ...Xamarin studio isn't a competitor to Visual Studio? That's all I know that Xamarin makes
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.
Visual Studio doesn't run on Mac OS to make iOS apps, VS Code is still only an editor not an IDE. So Xamarin could be very useful for MS.
Re:Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
by Sir_Substance on Wednesday February 24, 2016 @04:07PM
(#11170228)
I'm not debating that Xamarins products are useful to Microsoft, I'm questioning the assertion that they haven't just consumed a competitor.
Re:Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
by mynameisvlad on Wednesday February 24, 2016 @04:11PM
(#11170252)
Considering Microsoft has no Mac IDE, I'm not sure how Xamarin could be considered a competitor.
Re:Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
by Sir_Substance on Wednesday February 24, 2016 @05:25PM
(#11170736)
...because Visual Studio is a C#/C++ IDE that works on Windows, and Xamarin Studio is also a C#/C++ IDE that works on Windows?
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.
Have you ever used .NET on its own platform?
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.
Re:Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
by Sir_Substance on Thursday February 25, 2016 @07:04AM
(#11173863)
Xamarin studio can be run against .net on windows, it's not mono specific.
Yes, but what is the value of doing that instead of using Visual Studio?!
Re:Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
by Sir_Substance on Thursday February 25, 2016 @02:51PM
(#11177262)
Maybe I like it better?
WHY ARE WE ARGUING?
explodes
Re:Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
by assocguilt on Wednesday February 24, 2016 @05:57PM
(#11170933)
Ask them about Alan Truing - he kept his work secret so should have had his career ruined by the likes of you.
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.