Re:Why choose Xamarin?
by ogdenyogly on Friday June 27, 2014 @02:48PM
(#7955632)
I have done a lot amount of development in MonoTouch / MonoDroid (full time for about 2.5 years now). I started using them back when they were beta, and I would wager we have one of the larger apps written in Xamarin (about 250kloc).
First of all, it's tricky. It took our team a long time to get the rhythm of simultaneous Android/iOS development. For a long time every single push broke something.
Some annoyances:
Visual studio project files don't merge. You need a special xml aware merge tool to do this. Even then, its a pain in the ass.
It can be very tricky to abstract the differences between Droid and iOS if you're interacting with the OS a lot.
Some things to know:
Just because you're in C# land, doesn't mean your API is. You're going to spend a lot of time implementing stuff in C# that feels wrong because your API is ObjC/Java.
Sometimes there isn't a good mapping between NS data types between the APIs.
You're going to spend a LOT of time in the iOS / Droid docs, so you'd better be comfortable with ObjC / Java.
First of all, it's tricky. It took our team a long time to get the rhythm of simultaneous Android/iOS development. For a long time every single push broke something.
Some annoyances:
Visual studio project files don't merge. You need a special xml aware merge tool to do this. Even then, its a pain in the ass.
It can be very tricky to abstract the differences between Droid and iOS if you're interacting with the OS a lot.
Some things to know:
Just because you're in C# land, doesn't mean your API is. You're going to spend a lot of time implementing stuff in C# that feels wrong because your API is ObjC/Java.
Sometimes there isn't a good mapping between NS data types between the APIs.
You're going to spend a LOT of time in the iOS / Droid docs, so you'd better be comfortable with ObjC / Java.
Overall I'm happy with the experience.