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Microsoft Makes Xamarin Free In Visual Studio, Will Open Source Core Xamarin Tech (venturebeat.com)
An anonymous reader cites a report on VentureBeat: Microsoft today announced that Xamarin is now available for free for every Visual Studio user. This includes all editions of Visual Studio, including the free Visual Studio Community Edition, Visual Studio Professional, and Visual Studio Enterprise. Furthermore, Xamarin Studio for OS X is being made available for free as a community edition and Visual Studio Enterprise subscribers will get access to Xamarin's enterprise capabilities at no additional cost. The company also promised to open source Xamarin's SDK, including its runtime, libraries, and command line tools, as part of the .NET Foundation 'in the coming months.' Plenty of developers will find this announcement exciting. Xamarin being free is a big deal.
What is Xamarin? Why should I care about it?
I am bitching about the ratio of MS PR stories to Firehose submissions having been massively skewed in the last couple of days
Kindly actually calculate this obscene ration you are talking about? I'll be it's not anywhere near what you perceive, you are just overly sensitive to MS stories because of your bias. I'll bet that the facts will show an amazing small number of MS stories given their market share in the tech world.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Microsoft is a 800 lb gorilla still. When they make a large, sweeping move that affects the world of developers, it will be covered. If Oracle was to offer a free version of their SQL database that was fairly full featured but limited in memory like SQL express, it would be all over the news. But aside from Apple, Google and Amazon, very few companies can make changes that affect as many people as they do, and you certainly don't see successful tools become free or get ported to other operating systems that were always (and still are) in the competing column.
...but they also matter quite a bit to us some of us..
Microsoft's announcements are not normal announcements. There's a few other big companies that could do things that generate this much press but quite honestly very few of them have as much impact as what Microsoft does. The motto of this website is "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters". It certainly fits the first bill, and for a vast majority of us who deal with the microsoft ecosystem on a daily basis (and sometimes even enjoy certain products) the moves that they have made are not only news...
However these same people do not usually complain about the release of yet another point patch for Ubuntu, or the release of a new flavor of tool. Those that do operate under the microsoft umbrella increasingly embrace other tools as well, and while we might not click and read all of the stories we don't begrudge the fact that they are here.
Funny how when someone sees a news story that they disagree with it suddenly becomes "PR" or "An Ad."
"Science is the power of man"
So ... the front page is the wayside?
"Old man yells at systemd"
No but drinking from the annual MS BUILD conference is a press worthy IT event and yes they do PR. Get over it as it ends tomorrow anyway.
During LinuxWorld or a Redhat conference you will see ... shock Linux and FOSS stuff.
If the other tech sites like Neowin.net and arstechnica.com get the scope 1st subscribers will go there instead so yes.
FYI if you really hate MS and want to hear no news of it go into your login profile and edit the stories out. VIOLA no MS or Windows news. Slashcode is customizable for the user.
http://saveie6.com/
If you have to ask, you should first look it up, then ask an informed question
One of the reasons why I come here is to be exposed to tech that I haven't seen before. See something that you're not familiar with? Look it up!
Yes, it is reasonable, in general, to expect people to Google easy-to-find information.
/., you shouldn't have to say "... encryption, which is the process of encoding messages or information in such a way that only authorized parties can read it..." But this one, yeah, they could've spent 7 words to fill in the uninformed about what a Xamarin is.
Yes, it is also reasonable to expect a news summary (anywhere) to give at least a cursory explanation of abbreviations, technical terms, or made up words with which a substantial portion of the readership will be unfamiliar.
It's just good policy in writing: don't fight human nature. People skimming a summary, even smart, technically minded people who are Google search ninjas, don't want to have to go traipsing off somewhere else to investigate why they should even be reading the summary in the first place.
It need not take a lot of space, either. Examples:
"Microsoft today announced that Zazzlebazzle, a tool for dynamically replacing code comments with emojis, is now available for free for every Visual Studio user."
"Microsoft today announced that Sprug, a responsive framework for synergizing cloud competencies, is now available for free for every Visual Studio user."
"Microsoft today announced that ^F+7d#, a popular object-disoriented programming language, is now available for free for every Visual Studio user."
Note that this is audience-specific--if you're writing for
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