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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?
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.
There's already a beta out for it. Do you know what "vaporware" actually is?
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
Actually, there's a production version. It's currently not free, hence the news.
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.
There was a cheap license for indie devs, but unfortunately the assembly size limitation precluded the use of MonoGame. By just a few KB, to boot. :(
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"
An enterprise License was just under $2k ($1800 - $1900 if memory serves) per developer per platform (Android or iOS) per year. The next level down I think was ~$1k per platform per year. The License for individuals to be able to have unlimited lines of code, use of 3rd party libraries, and VS integration, among other features was I think ~$30/month per platform. They did have a free option, but you were limited in the size of the programs you could build, couldn't use VisualStudio to build and deploy the apps (limited to Xamarin Studio), and couldn't import external libraries beyond the standard C# imports.
Microsoft has a developer conference whose announcements are more directly related to the primary purpose of this site than 90% of the other posts. It happens once a year.
Don't worry, we will get back to your typical unrelated crap posts soon enough, and you'll be happy for the next 362 days.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
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.
Dude VS 2015 is the most multiplatform version ever. No I am not paid by MS.
After Gates and Balmer, MS has made Android SDK and emulators, ported Clang to Windows, added GIT and git hub, adding Mac OSX and Linux to VS online, added support for making Xaramin and mono apps, made CentOS and Ubuntu virtual machines for Azure, open sourced and ported Powershell to Linux, made MS code editor and ported it to Linux and MacOSX, open sourced their .NET compiler and frameworks, made VS 2015 for free aka community edition which is not crippled!
Oh and ubuntu is going to run with bash on Windows 10 with apt-get. Oh and SQL Server is on Linux now too!
No folks you did not misread what I wrote.
Linux FOSS is not an OS but a religion for many on here. If you have strong blinders on how is anyone different from a creationist denying evolution?
I am not paid or a troll but if I had to choose between Oracle and MS, I would pick MS in 2015. Something unthinkable in 2001 when I too believed in the theology of free software liberation and wanted MS to die. But, like IBM things changed with competition and I grew up too.
MS may not have historically made the best operating systems. But, their business software is very strong. I see Visual Studio as being more open and better in recent releases
http://saveie6.com/
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/
It's a cross-platform wrapper for Mono (an open-source version of C#/F#/.Net) that compiles to iOS and Android applications. There's a big push in Xamarin to try to make the UI (a) sane for the developer regarding versions and (b) proper native UI interfaces (not HTML5) that conform to the expectations on each device type.
It also exposes the sensors/other phone things. If you like C#/F#/etc. (although not VB.net, cause that's a bad language and only bad people like it) this is a product that used to be in the $1,000+ going free.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
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
Nothing posted to
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.
Of course they are fucking skewed for the last few days. There Dev conference is on and as usual they make a ton of announcements at that conference, many of which are most definitely, news and technology that matters or affects people that work with computers.
Now, can I really target all those platforms from a single code base
Yes.