Slashdot Mirror
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.
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Amidst all these MS stories is the single, underlying one: MS had a developers conference in which many Wizards of Oz performed their tricks, and many journalists excitedly published those single items, and many Slashdotters submitted them here. The PR onslaught continues, meanwhile a long list of genuinely interesting stories submitted by well-meaning members fall by the wayside.
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
What is Xamarin? Why should I care about it?
Nothing to see here, move along.
Xamarin being free is a big deal.
What was it licensed under before? People paid money for it?
Before, the free tier was limited to pure-CLR, with no calls to Java (on Android) or native code (on any mobile platform). This prevented me from making use of it. Now, I can't find any explanation of exactly how the license and right-to-use has changed. Anyone got any details?
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.
WTF is a Xamarin?
Microsoft's web page for it doesn't tell either.
There must be a reason Microsoft refuses to admit what it is.
It's interesting that they are afraid to describe this product. They must be ashamed of it.
Fr M looking at Microsoft's webpage, I don't think they know either.
Because their marketing department is completely clueless.
Is there anything they make that they shouldn't be ashamed of?
So, suddenly we seem to have only one editor, who mostly flogs Microsoft stuff, and utterly fails to identify what the hell the article is about.
What the hell is Xamarin? Why would I follow a link to find out that Microsoft is now giving away something I've never heard of.
Holy crap is Slashdot going downhill.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
It's a bloated and slow text editor.
This. They can't even explain what this damn thing does.
Visual Studio was pretty good at version 6, after that it went downhill.
WTF is a Xamarin?
www.xamarin.com
Though the 'actors' or whatever, they show in the photo look like typical douches of what marketing-types think developers look like now.
What are you smoking? VS wasn't even usable until .NET.
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!
Especially for this topic - "Xamarin", just by itself, is an extremely unique search term thus enabling you to self-educate with almost no effort. And today the whole Xamarin+VS is at the top of any search results for either.
Slashdot is "news for nerds", not "news for people who kinda like plunking around on their computers in between their online first-person shooter games but don't really want to have to, y'know, think about this stuff"
Just want to point out that I called Xamarin going free a little while ago: Post Here.
This is great, great news, something I've been really looking forward to. I've known people to make apps in Unity3D because it was cheaper than Xamarin, even though Xamarin is a better product.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Microsoft actually did something good for once. I'm really looking forward to experimenting with this as it used to cost a ridiculous price of thousands of dollars! This may actually open up the windows store and visual studio to more opportunities. Visual Studio is the best environment to program in, by far... JAVA is OK but lacks features and frankly has security issues. C# is by far easier to work with and this may bring it into the mobile revolution. Oh and Microsoft... Please fix the privacy issues with windows 10.... NOW!
WTF is a Xamarin?
www.xamarin.com
Though the 'actors' or whatever, they show in the photo look like typical douches of what marketing-types think developers look like now.
I now know less than I did before.
Cross development mobile development platform. Use C# on Android/IOS.
https://www.lynda.com/Developm...
I thought it was a build system. Boy, Microsoft is confused.
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.
What's that, am I supposed to know already? Or is that part of the ploy, to get me to look up the stuff.
As with everything from Microsoft. I'm sure you all realize it by now. Microsoft is incapable of doing anything legitimate or for unselfish reasons. It's just who they are. Shits.
6 was lightyears better than .NET
I don't think so.