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Microsoft Open Source Programming

Microsoft Makes Xamarin Free In Visual Studio, Will Open Source Core Xamarin Tech (venturebeat.com) 143

Posted by msmash from the 'developers-developers-developers' dept.
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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Microsoft Makes Xamarin Free In Visual Studio, Will Open Source Core Xamarin Tech More

Microsoft Makes Xamarin Free In Visual Studio, Will Open Source Core Xamarin Tech

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  • Huh (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 31, 2016 @11:44AM (#51815281)

    What is Xamarin? Why should I care about it?

    • What is Xamarin? Why should I care about it?

      If you have to ask, you shouldn't care.

      • Re:Huh (Score:5, Insightful)

        by OzPeter ( 195038 ) on Thursday March 31, 2016 @11:51AM (#51815385)

        What is Xamarin? Why should I care about it?

        If you have to ask, the editors didn't do their job

        FTFY

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          This place has editors?

        • 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 sh

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by EvilSS ( 557649 )

            "news for people who kinda like plunking around digging a new room for their bunkers, tightening their tinfoil hats, and screaming at kids to get off their lawns, but don't really want to have to, y'know, think about this stuff"

            FTFY :)

          • Re:Look it up already! (Score:5, Insightful)

            by flopsquad ( 3518045 ) on Thursday March 31, 2016 @02:21PM (#51817339)

            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.

            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 /., 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.

            • Note that this is audience-specific--if you're writing for /., you shouldn't have to say...

              Agreed - that's exactly what I'm pushing. Here on /. we should be expected to know about technology, or have enough interest to go look it up (or be mature enough to ignore it). One of the ways that /. can differentiate itself from other websites is by attracting a more technically proficient audience, and part of that is to implicitly establish the 'floor' of knowledge expected of participants.

              Personally, I find this to be a good way to figure out what I ought to know - if something comes up and I don't

            • Sprug is free now and they lead with Xamarin? Wth...

      • gdi, need to cancel a mod point

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by pla ( 258480 )
        If you have to ask, you shouldn't care.

        Quite the opposite in this case - If you have to ask (and do any mobile development at all), you haven't yet noticed that you have a large asteroid falling out of the sky directly toward your comfortable little picnic.

        Not everyone will use Xamarin, but if you haven't at least evaluated it and deemed it irrelevant to your situation, you need a new career.

        • I guess I was implying that: if you haven't noticed this asteroid falling from the sky toward the mobile development picnic, you're obviously not doing serious mobile development and therefore should not care.

          Also, there's the "if you can't Google a name like Xamarin and come up with a relevant description of what it is and why you should care" that, again, Xamarin is irrelevant to you.

    • Re:Huh (Score:5, Informative)

      by U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M ( 4212163 ) on Thursday March 31, 2016 @11:49AM (#51815339)

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      "With a C#-shared codebase, developers can use Xamarin tools to write native Android, iOS, and Windows apps with native user interfaces and share code across multiple platforms."

      • Straight out of the opening paragraph. Thanks for that much at least, it's a heck of a lot more than the "editors" provided. I come to slashdot because of the community and the wide-ranging tech articles that keep me keep abreast of things far outside my specific area of expertise. It'd be nice if the editors did their job and offered at least minimal context. Glad to see the community is still taking up the slack after all these years.

        Honestly though, even skimming Wikipedia leaves me uncertain. So, i

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Rob Y. ( 110975 )

        Okay. But 'share code' sounds like code written with Xamarin can be simply recompiled for multiple platforms to produce complete running apps from a single code base. I'm guessing that's not the case - and it would take some careful reading of Xamarin promotional materials to figure that out. It's not unreasonable to ask someone who presumably knows whether it is or is not.

        Share code could mean little more than 'use the C# language to build your Android and iOS apps'. I guess that's not nothing. But of

        • Okay. But 'share code' sounds like code written with Xamarin can be simply recompiled for multiple platforms to produce complete running apps from a single code base. I'm guessing that's not the case

          Actually in a fair number of situations that is exactly the case - including the GUI bits. For non-trivial business / news / info apps you can get well over 90% of your code straight compiled with no changes and often you can push that very close to 100%.

          On the other hand, you still retain full access to the underlying OS API and of course for games or apps that want to perform UI tricks and interact with specific hardware features then you will simply isolate that bit of specific code for each device OS.

          it

    • Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)

      by Freshly Exhumed ( 105597 )

      What is Xamarin? Why should I care about it?

      The Slashdot interface contains a search tool. Try the term "Xamarin" in it. :)

      • If you have to go searching for core contextual information on an article, then the editors have already failed, badly. Slashdot covers such a wide range of tech that nobody can hope to keep track of it all, a handful of words offering context is the entire point of having editors - nobody cares about misspelled words or bad punctuation. Well not outside of a few grammar nazis, and we all like to poke fun, but it doesn't really *matter* the way core context does.

        Well, not usually anyway. Now if you'll ex

    • What is Xamarin? Why should I care about it?

      Google search for "how to search for information on the Intertubes [google.com]".

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Allows C# devs to write mobile apps for iOS, Android, and OSX. Now C# code can run on Windows, Linux, OSX, Android, and iOS. Java killer, perhaps?

    • As far as I know Xamarin is the company behind the already open source mono and the only Xamarin branded product I know of is Xamarin studio which is just a proprietary monodevelop. So I too would like to know what is Xamarin, why is this a big deal, and why should I care?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by LesFerg ( 452838 )

        As far as I know Xamarin is the company behind the already open source mono and the only Xamarin branded product I know of is Xamarin studio which is just a proprietary monodevelop. So I too would like to know what is Xamarin, why is this a big deal, and why should I care?

        While mono was an open source project, the important parts of Xamarin run-time were commercialized.
        There was a "free" entry level but it was limited in code size or something like that, so much that the first tutorial I tried to follow was not buildable. After that I decided to let it mature a little, and maybe see if the price came down.

        At least it could be better than trying to wade through the abominable mess that Microsoft have left us with now, with the enterprise-wide workstation freeze on windows 7,

    • I think that I get emails about it from Canadian pharmacies.

    • Since the article didn't explain things very well

      The people that are Xamarin are also the same people that maintain mono for running .Net apps under Linux
      For a while now they've been making money by selling a product that allows you to run .Net apps under Android and IOS
      The main down side is that it's quite expensive and an additional cost on top of Visual Studio.
      The main up side is that you can write apps for Android or IOS while using .Net and avoiding java

      The above announcement means lots of .Net develop

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by LesFerg ( 452838 )

        Since the article didn't explain things very well

        The people that are Xamarin are also the same people that maintain mono for running .Net apps under Linux

        For a while now they've been making money by selling a product that allows you to run .Net apps under Android and IOS

        I believe parts of the code apply to all operating systems, but the UI parts need to be written for each, as well as various device interfaces and such.

        Also the announcement of making the core parts free may not apply to all the deployment and run-time parts of the product. I wouldn't be surprised if there is still a cost involved in getting an app running on IOS.

    • If you don't know you are a psych student or a sociology major, so what the fuck are you doing in /.?

  • 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?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It will be MIT license, so completely free to use by everyone for everything for every purpose.
      It will be bundled with Visual Studio, which is not free software, although a "gratis" version exist for "non-enterprise" users.
      Other development tools will be able to include Xamarin, Jetbrains new C# IDE will most likely do that.
      And really, anybody could take the pure source and do whatever they wanted with it.

  • WTF is a Xamarin?

  • Just want to point out that I called Xamarin going free a little while ago: Post Here [slashdot.org].

    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.

    • Does Xamarin actually offer Unity3D-scope game engine stuff? Or were people just using the Unity3D prep-level stuff for convenience?

      • Xamarin does not offer Unity3D-scope features for game development. I assume (but never looked into it) that it offers cross-platform 3D API calls.

        In my example, people were using Unity3D for app development (with a basic 2D GUI). (Admittedly, these were game developers who were more familiar with Unity3D. But the real issue was they already bought their Unity3D licenses, and the Xamarin licenses were more expensive.). That meant all the GUI felt the same across all the versions of app, but not like a na

  • YES! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ilsaloving ( 1534307 ) on Thursday March 31, 2016 @03:06PM (#51817737)

    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Rob Y. ( 110975 )

      I agree. But QT, I believe includes cross-platform UI components. Does Xamarin? Or (as several have mentioned here), are they just 'working on it'?

    • I agree and scouring the license looking for the gotcha. If this is legit and I can use it for FREE on Mac, I am going to have a tough time staying with Objective-C/Swift and move to C#. This could be the biggest move Microsoft ever made and it could result in apps being produced for their wretched phones. The question is what is C# and how hard is it to learn the Xamarin Framework, exploring now.

      Looking at the DEMO App TASKY, the code seems very readable, reminds me of the old Visual Basic Stuff. Goin

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by LesFerg ( 452838 )

        ... Looking at the DEMO App TASKY, the code seems very readable, reminds me of the old Visual Basic Stuff ...

        Ewww. How can you say that? Visual Basic cannot possibly compare to C#. Horrid outdated language that it is.
        Personally I have to support still-running code written in VB6, as well as having the pleasure of writing new stuff in C#. The more C# evolves, the uglier it is to take a step back in time and read/update the VB code. (I replace the VB6 components with .Net alternatives every time I have the excuse to do so, but it still won't all go away).

        Try C#, it has so many excellent features now.

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