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Microsoft To Acquire Xamarin (phoronix.com)
New submitter androlinuz writes: Microsoft has signed an agreement to acquire Xamarin, a leading platform provider for mobile app development. In conjunction with Visual Studio, Xamarin provides a rich mobile development offering that enables developers to build mobile apps using C# and deliver fully native mobile app experiences to all major devices, including iOS, Android, and Windows. Xamarin's approach enables developers to take advantage of the productivity and power of .NET to build mobile apps, and to use C# to write to the full set of native APIs and mobile capabilities provided by each device platform.
Looks like Miguel de Icaza has officially become part of Microsoft. Maybe he can pull a Elop and get Windows 11 to use Gnome as its desktop environment.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Now that Microsoft open sourced .NET (https://github.com/Microsoft/dotnet) this makes sense. Really happy for everyone at Xamarin, they are one of those companies that put in the work and deserve this.
Advertisement for what, exactly? Do you consider this to not be news that people might want to know about? Or are you just a jerk?
You can always remove your account and not visit slashdot if you don't like it.
fully native mobile app experiences to all major devices, including iOS, Android, and Windows. Xamarin's approach enables developers to take advantage of the productivity and power of .NET to build mobile apps
Wow.
Someone ha d a second glass of the cool aid.
bickerdyke
As far as I understood, it's simply a way to use C# to develop cross-platform mobile apps - nothing as grandiose as you're suggesting. That a space that, at least initially, Microsoft wasn't interested in filling. However, given Microsoft's recent focus on cross-platform development, this actually makes a lot of sense for both companies. For Microsoft, it means not having to duplicate work that's already been done, and for Xamarin, frankly, it means not having to compete with a space Microsoft wants to get in.
Historically speaking, I'd argue that Mono has been the alternative to Microsoft's proprietary implementation of C#, along with whatever other languages it supports. Also, now that Microsoft has open-sourced the .NET core, there might end up being a waning demand for an alternative implementation, although that's admittedly just a guess.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
"Embrace, extend, extinguish"...
Onda Technology Institute
What? No. Xamarin allows you to develop .Net apps for iOS and Android using Mono (Android) or a rickety cross-compilation toolchain (iOS). These days you use something very similar to the Windows Mobile API (including XAML) to target iOS, Android and WinMo/Metro. It's pretty nifty; I work on a Xamarin-based app and about 95% of the code is shared while the app looks and feels 100% native on all platforms.
I can see Xamarin as something Microsoft would want - now they supply one of the most popular APIs for cross-platform app development.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Normally, I would say that this is a bad thing, but Xamarian's pricing is brutal anyone who just wants to play around, explore, and possibly try to sell an app or two if they're halfway decent. When I was looking at cross-platform development tools, I was really interested in using Xamarian, but I wasn't about to fork over $1000/year just to play with developing cross platform software (ie: mobile AND desktop). And their starter edition only runs with Visual Studio, which is Windows only.
QT is even worse. Their documentation actually states "Please consult a lawyer before using QT for commercial development". Their pricing is so brutal they don't even advertise it on their website. I had to google for leaked price lists just to get a ballpark figure, and the prices almost made me fall out of my chair. So heaven forbid you write an app and think, "Hey, this ain't bad. I'll put this on the app stores and see if anyone likes it." QT will be suddenly expecting several thousand dollars right up front before you legally able to sell.
I really like the "It's ok, you can pay us once you're making money" system that Unreal and Unity have switched to. THAT's how you encourage indie adoption. Unfortunately they're geared primarily for making games, not regular applications, so if you wanted to create some kind of database-type system or whatever, then those toolkits are not a good fit.
Like most stuff at MS these days, it's Azure. A mobile app is just another front end to a web applications, and this makes the case of having using .Net from end to end and hosting in Azure and using things like Azure Mobile Services, Service Fabric and so on.
Miguel de Icaza, you earned it.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Xamarin simply sponsored Mono, but that doesn't necessarily grant the ability to kill it. How would they "pull the plug" on an open-source and free project? Besides, it would just scare people away from .NET in general, so I just don't see that happening.
Microsoft is simply embracing other platforms, especially mobile, as they well understand they don't really have a serious dog in that fight with Windows mobile. They'd like to keep developers on Windows, and offering high-quality tools for multi-platform development is a way to do that, because yes, both Visual Studio and Windows (for PC) are important products still, despite overall waning importance of the PC platform. At the very least, keeping mobile developers in the VS environment certainly won't *hurt* their own product line, as they may get some ports they otherwise wouldn't have.
Even so, when your company is focusing on services like Azure to a much greater extent, the client's platform doesn't really matter quite as much. I really don't think it's anything more complicated than that. People keep looking for deep, nefarious reasons for what MS does, when most of it can be explained by reasonably straightforward business strategies or strategic goals.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
As the monkey once said, Developers Developers Developers! It's Microsoft trying to get people used to using Microsoft tools. If you use Visual Studio, you can use its built-in Xamarin integration to develop your Android and iOS apps. Once you're doing that, you really might as well also publish for the Windows app store - it's minimal additional effort and nets you at least a few percent more of the market - and that's what Microsoft really needs people doing.
The whole "Windows Phone / Windows 10 Mobile is a pretty good OS, runs on some nice hardware, etc... but it has no apps so I went with Android / iOS" thing has been discussed nigh unto death, both on Slashdot and across the broader web. Microsoft has, for years, been searching for a way to get developers to publish for the Windows [Phone] store. If they can get people using the tools and frameworks, and make it *really* easy to then target Windows as well, they can perhaps finally solve the chicken-and-egg problem: Windows phones don't have many apps, so they have low market share, so there aren't many users to buy apps, so most developers don't publish apps for them, so there aren't many apps...
If Microsoft can break that loop, they have a chance in the mobile market again. This is one (of several) approaches that they are taking to try and achieve this.
Disclaimer: Not a MS employee, and the above is based on personal observations and guesswork, not on published statements or insider information.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
It was overdue. Oddly, I think it was Xamarin that delayed this acquisition. I think MS would have been happy to pick them up two years ago. For all the flack Miguel de Icaza gets, he is a big open source supporter, and I bet he was concerned with how that would work being at MS and all. But, when .Net core happened, the writing was on the wall, and now they can just get .Net core to be what it needs to be.
Make no mistake, this is a play to displace some existing players and to encourage adoption of hosting on Azure and using Azure services. It's a good story for a lot of companies. You can use one set of skills (C#/.Net) to address development from end to end and you get pretty streamlined hosting (via Azure). Compared to having to assemble all the pieces from front to back, plenty of companies will take the ecosystem lock in.
Microsoft lacks the power to do that shit any more, and they know it. They're not betting the company on the success of the Windows phone. They're hoping people will develop apps for Android and iPhone (and Windows) using C#. As someone who prefers C# to Java, I really want to see this happen seamlessly.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
WPF is a library that is on top of the .NET framework. It isn't part of the .NET framework. Just like glibc isn't part of the Linux kernel.
.NET platform as well as the compiler is open source and pretty good stuff too.
The entire
Honestly, I'm kinda with matty on this. I don't really see this as an advertisement. I see this as something that genuinely will be a boon to me since I do all my development using Visual Studio and C# and just yesterday was heading to Xamarin's website to purchase a license and now I think I'll hold off a little since I think it will be part of my MSDN subscription soon.
If it is an advertisement, it kinda worked backwards, I'm going to spend like $2000 less (2 platforms) per year now because of this information. So, Microsoft kinda just lost the $2000 I was about to give them company they're buying.
In the late 1990s our company released some serious Java software for a very significant US market. We were very successful with it, and Sun used our logo as one of the success stories when taking out some double-page ads in papers like the New York Times. I have always been a huge fan of Java, but these days, when I do something for the JVM, it tends to be Scala. I much prefer Scala to Java.
About six years ago I was asked to take on some C#/.NET stuff, and it was surprising to me how easy it was coming from Java. C# was clearly a "copy" of Java. This was .NET 3.5. After a while I realized that the MS tooling plus the C# language and the .NET environment made me more productive in C# than I had been on Java. Tooling in particular was very good, but also some of the language features of C# were simply more mature and more well thought-out than in Java land. C# does, for example, auto-boxing properly while Java autoboxing is a cluster fuck (compiler-stage autoboxing an Boolean object to a bool, for example is an idea that must have come out of the excrement of a brain dead developer, for example).
Then C# developed. Took on functional aspects, got Linq, moved on. Java on the other hand. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. For years and years. Death by committee. Today a decent developer is probably twice as productive in C#/.NET as it is possible to be in Java, and things do not seem to be improving much. If your shop uses Windows PCs, Active Directory etc, you'd be practically insane to use Java/JVM over C#/.NET.
Now, if the Xamarin move pans out, if you are a Windows shop who need specialized mobile apps, you'd be insane not to use C# or (important, I would typically use this) Cordova.