Microsoft Makes Xamarin Free In Visual Studio, Will Open Source Core Xamarin Tech (venturebeat.com) 143
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.
Huh (Score:4, Insightful)
What is Xamarin? Why should I care about it?
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What is Xamarin? Why should I care about it?
If you have to ask, you shouldn't care.
Re:Huh (Score:5, Insightful)
What is Xamarin? Why should I care about it?
If you have to ask, the editors didn't do their job
FTFY
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This place has editors?
Look it up already! (Score:2)
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
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"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)
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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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
Re: Look it up already! (Score:2)
Sprug is free now and they lead with Xamarin? Wth...
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Nope. But it is their job to include a descriptive sentence (or heck, even a phrase) so those of us who like to keep tabs on a broad range of tech areas don't have to go to an independent web site to clarify such a simple but obscure detail central to the article.
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No, it's a news-seeded discussion forum. Failing to respect that is how DICE nearly killed it off. There's dozens of superior news aggregators out there, even ignoring the automated ones. What keeps people coming to Slashdot is the quirky and though-provoking community. As such, summaries that are insufficiently informative to allow people to decide if they want to read the article, much less contribute to the discussion, are counterproductive.
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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.
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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)
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."
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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
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I'm still not quite sure myself what Xamarin is supposed to be after reading the Wikipedia page about it.
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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
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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
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What is Xamarin? Why should I care about it?
The Slashdot interface contains a search tool. Try the term "Xamarin" in it. :)
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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
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What is Xamarin? Why should I care about it?
Google search for "how to search for information on the Intertubes [google.com]".
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What would I need an inner tube buying guide for?
Did you even check your link before sending it?
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Beats thinking it's a convoy of trucks, I guess.
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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?
Java killer (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Java killer (Score:4, Informative)
I'm interested in a real life example
LabNation SmartScope software [lab-nation.com] is (partly) written using Xamarin, it runs on Linux, MacOS, Windows, Android and iOS.
Link to GitHub [github.com].
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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,
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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 .Net apps under Android and IOS .Net and avoiding java
For a while now they've been making money by selling a product that allows you to run
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
The above announcement means lots of .Net develop
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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.
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Re:More useless microsoft vaporware (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Huh (Score:4, Funny)
Xamarin is pretty popular. Maybe you're just out of the game.
Nah, my doctor had me stop taking it, and use Aspirin instead.
Re: Not trying to be a wiseass, just asking (Score:3, Interesting)
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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. :(
Re:Not trying to be a wiseass, just asking (Score:5, Informative)
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Quite correct, only with the "Indie" version (the $30/month one) you couldn't use Visual Studio, that was restricted to "Business" license users ($1k/year).
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Also I believe you needed to buy a full separate license for each OS you wanted to target.
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How does this impact the license from before? (Score:1)
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?
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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.
As a developer on Microsoft OSs for over 30 years (Score:1)
WTF is a Xamarin?
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Cross development mobile development platform. Use C# on Android/IOS.
https://www.lynda.com/Developm... [lynda.com]
Called it (Score:2)
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.
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Does Xamarin actually offer Unity3D-scope game engine stuff? Or were people just using the Unity3D prep-level stuff for convenience?
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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)
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.
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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'?
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includes cross-platform UI components. Does Xamarin?
Yes.
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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
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... 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. .Net alternatives every time I have the excuse to do so, but it still won't all go away).
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
Try C#, it has so many excellent features now.
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I am with you 100% on Objective C, that language is too hard for my brain to process. I realize it is a superset of C so it had to abandon C style syntax like dot notation and parenthesis. I find Objective C almost impossible to move quickly in, I can see why they replaced it with Swift, which is much, much more readable.
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meanwhile a long list of genuinely interesting stories submitted by well-meaning members fall by the wayside.
Such as?
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So ... the front page is the wayside?
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Ars Technica has a really great article about Amazon expanding their Dash buttons to cover Red Bull, Starbucks, Trojan condoms and your mom.
As far as I can tell with a quick scan, nobody has submitted that as a story to Slashdot. You can see the submissions (and vote for them yourself) at the Firehose [slashdot.org], and if you feel that they have missed something then you can submit a story [slashdot.org].
It is not some massive conspiracy that they are only accepting Microsoft-related posts. They simply cannot reject a story that you find interesting that hasn't been submitted for consideration by anyone.
Re:More Microsoft PR Here Today? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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There are loads of MS stories on the web, but this suddenly massive quantity of MS stories here on Slashdot is getting in the way of some really interesting geek stories that are not being allowed through for whatever reason. If you love MS stories, there are sites that cater directly to that, but if you want an all-around great geekish-story site you might hopefully continue to get that here at Slashdot if some adjustments can be made by the editors. Further, if there is any sort of policy or agenda to gre
Re:More Microsoft PR Here Today? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:More Microsoft PR Here Today? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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I am bitching about the ratio of MS PR stories to Firehose submissions having been massively skewed in the last couple of days. I identified that the dev conference is the basic cause, so we agree on that point. THAT's my issue. It is annoying to me, so I bitch about it. I get modded down, I get up again.
Re: More Microsoft PR Here Today? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: More Microsoft PR Here Today? (Score:4, Insightful)
Funny how when someone sees a news story that they disagree with it suddenly becomes "PR" or "An Ad."
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Re:More Microsoft PR Here Today? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:More Microsoft PR Here Today? (Score:5, Informative)
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
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Okay. Lots of stuff. Now, can I really target all those platforms from a single code base, or is this all just TMI that makes me think I might be able to?
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Now, can I really target all those platforms from a single code base
Yes.
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> ported Powershell to Linux
What? That's news to me. There's Pash [github.com], but that's not from Microsoft, and it's very, very alpha.
Re: More Microsoft PR Here Today? (Score:2)
There sure is [microsoft.com]
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That's not really what most would consider "Powershell", though, is it?
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That's not PowerShell for Linux. It's PowerShell for managing Linux machines from Windows machines. Not the same thing.
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What the hell is Xamarin?
Hmm, that's a good question, too bad the article doesn't give any indication...
What, what's this text on the top of the second image in the article?
Build C# apps on Android, iOS, Windows, and Mac with Xamarin.
Geeze, it's like no one has any reading comprehension any more...
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Oh, bullshit. The ENTIRE SUMMARY is:
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So, something I've never heard of is now free ... do I give a shit or not?
If you've never heard of it, and can't be bothered to click a link placed directly in fron of you, then no, you obviously don't give a shit.
Hey, why not just post URLs with no summary, and we'll cut out the middle man entirely?
Counter-point: if you can't be bothered to click a link, why not just repost the full article, then?
The people who are interested in this piece of news already know what Xamarin is, seeing as it's pretty popular amongst cross-platform mobile developers, so it's no more unreasonable to not include a description than it would be to not describe what Android or iOS is. An
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Slashdot is a basically sort of a news gathering service. It should tell us what the linked articles are about, otherwise as gstoddart said they might as well just post huge lists of URLs.
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Hear, hear.
Re:Holy crap ... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Except for when Apple has its conference and it's all Apple news (although mostly for consumers, not devs.), and when Google has its conference...
OMG, it's almost like a conspiracy to allocate news stories by what's going on in the world as opposed to ensuring an even ticket punch of issues/topics every day regardless of what's happening.
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and you'll be happy for the next 362 days.
361. You fail to take into account one very special day tomorrow.
Re:Holy crap ... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Your comment is more informative than both TFS and the Wikipedia page combined.
Thank you.
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Thanks! It's always nice to feel appreciated!
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Out of honest curiosity, have you used "real" programming languages? It's been years since I looked, but it always seemed to me that C# combined the worst weaknesses of C++ and Java into an unholy amalgamation without either of their strengths.
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Dunno what to tell you there, besides it's time to look again.
Yes, when C# first started, it was basically just a "meh" clone of Java. But these days, I can't think of a language I'd rather use. It's gone way past Java in the last few years, Java is even starting to copy things out of C# such as automatic properties, lambda expressions, etc. (Sure both were invented with other languages, but C# was the first to bring them mainstream and make them indispensable.)
Try it again now, it's really turned into some
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Huh. Maybe it's finally worth taking a serious look at.
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been years since I looked, but it always seemed to me that C# combined the worst weaknesses of C++ and Java into an unholy amalgamation
Clearly years ago. I have developed in Java since 1998, and C# is, and has been since about 3.5, what Java once dreamed of being. Today C# and the .Net framework, is heads and shoulders above what Java aspires to be but can't due to the thing named "designed by committee".