I'm not saying Xamarin won't work for you, plenty of people seem to be productive in it. I personally have switched my focus to React and React-Native (coming from a c#/.net background).
Now I just wish MS would support React as a first class citizen in Visual Studio 2015/Community. It's great it's supported in Code, but lets get it supported across the entire VS family. That would rule.
With Ubuntu space native on Windows you actually CAN develop a react native app on Windows now.
I just run the packager, with watchman and flow disabled, and it works pretty well. The VS Android emulator is free and so much faster than the default emulator - thats why i use Windows to create Android apps atleast.
The timeline was to strict for me to risk running into a massive "gotcha."
Ionic was a known entity and the "we will deliver successfully" choice as opposed to the "it will be so cool if this works" choice.
In my heart I definitely wanted to make the cool choice... But pragmatism won out.
https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=11398297&goto=threads%...
and now this arrives...
basically been struggling to run nuclide in an virtualbox ubuntu image on windows.
This basically brings the react native to windows!!!!!!
I always found it pretty pissy that nuclide didn't support windowds out of the gate and it was too much like Atom (insanely customizable but without the ability to ctrl+click on functions and variable declaration and high configurability with dependencies on 3rd party packages breaks Atom).
like the comment by jolux, I vastly prefer VS over Atom. In fact I might ditch Atom asides using it as a powerful Notepad.
man what is going on today? it's like a blitzkrieg by Microsoft.
Yesterday Microsoft was still uninteresting to me because I associated with being close source, not playing nice with other open source technologies....
I can confidently say that my view of Microsoft has changed dramatically after release of VS, React-Native, Xamarin, and now an AWS Lambda alternative that looks much better than AWS....here's hoping I can get some free credits from Azure to test out Azure....which equally I used to ignore but now...I'm taking a keen interest in Azure and what it has to offer over AWS...
It's really interesting to see Microsoft has made a huge effort in winning developer's hearts by opening up everything and it's working!