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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.
Believe it or not, many here do work in the Microsoft "ecosystem" and so are interested in these things. Also, the non-Microsoft stories far out number the Microsoft stories.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Drink from the Firehose on a regular basis. It is good for seeing some otherwise-buried material. In the last 2 days of this MS PR onslaught there are quite a few interesting stories that got dumped. Too bad.
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
I think so, as a long time C# dev, I was stuck to use Xamarin to port my code to other os. Now have it for free, built-in my dev environment it just get better.
It was hella expensive before and a very valuable tool if you didn't want to rewrite code from c# to objective c or swift
As much as I hate Microsoft, this is absolutely fantastic news.
I really wanted to learn Xamarin, but their pricing started at ouchy, and then went batshit ludicrous. (Their 'free' offering was such a joke that I pretend it doesn't even exist).
All the major cross-platform game engines have gone the 'pay us when you make some money' route, but the major application toolkits like Xamarin and QT refused to let go of their expensive subscription models. That means you couldn't just dabble and see what happens, cause if you so much as entertained the notion of putting your application up on an app store (even if it was free), you were required to pay out hefty sums on a monthly basis.
This is a move I've been really hoping someone would make, because now I have a no-risk way to do fully cross-platform development (ie: mobile *and* desktop, not just multiple mobile platforms). WXWidgets appears to have stalled. ObjectPascal/Lazarus looks amazing, but very rough. Phonegap is slick, but it doesn't even try to target desktop.
Meanwhile, writing in good old-fashioned C++ would still require me to learn the boilerplate code for every platform I would want to target.
And now, for the first time ever I have a very compelling reason to learn C#.
Well played, Microsoft. Well played.