Xamarin Blog

http://blog.xamarin.com/microsoft-and-xamarin-expand-global-partnership/

"Today we’re excited to take the partnership to the next level, by announcing:

1. Support for Visual Studio 2015 – Today, we released support for the Visual Studio 2015 Preview release, which includes Xamarin templates that make it easier to discover and download Xamarin from within the IDE.

2. Free Xamarin Starter Edition for Visual Studio Users – Today, Microsoft announced a new, free edition to Visual Studio—Visual Studio Community. Visual Studio Community contains support for extensions, which means it will be Xamarin compatible with from day one. We want to help make Visual Studio Community a tool for anyone to create native apps for iOS and Android, so we are announcing our plans to enable our freely available Xamarin Starter Edition to work with Visual Studio Community. We are also doubling the size limit on apps that can be created with Xamarin Starter Edition, so that you can build even more capable apps for free. This will be available in the coming weeks.

3. Special offers for MSDN Subscribers – We’ve worked with Microsoft to create a 20% discount for Visual Studio Premium and Ultimate MSDN subscribers to purchase Xamarin Business or Enterprise Editions, or world-class mobile development training with Xamarin University, available up to 60 days after the Visual Studio Purchase."

Great news if true. I've always thought MS should be more involved in the Mono/Xamarin platform. It makes far more sense for MS's mobile strategy than adding Android compatibility to WP. Instead, encourage devs to create a single .NET app that can be deployed to Android, iOS, and OSX, in addition to first-class support on WP and W8. You'd lose out on the current hot apps, but for the future it makes sense. For instance, several Nokia X Android apps were ported from their WP counterparts using Xamarin - http://blog.xamarin.com/nokia-x-for-csharp/ .

My only concerns if this were to happen are,

* What happens to Mono on Linux, BSD & OSX? Does Mono simply become a deployment target for mobile devices?

* What happens to MonoDevelop? Will VS be the only way to develop such apps?

* What about the web? I'd love to see a Mono port to pNACL or asm.js. An NACL port already exists, but it would be great to have one codebase targeting almost all platforms.

Either way, as someone considering using .NET with ServiceStack on the backend and Xamarin on the frontend, it's very exciting.

Eto is very interesting but unfortunately there seems to be just 1 (very active) developer behind it, from what I can see.

On the other hand, Xamarin.Forms had an announcement recently, an announcement that Hacker News missed. I submitted the news a few days ago but it didn't reach the first page:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14383467 ->

https://blog.xamarin.com/glimpse-future-xamarin-forms-3-0/

TL;DR:

Xamarin.Forms will support desktop environments:

- Windows (WPF)

- MacOS (Cocoa)

- Linux (GTK#)

This is on top of the mobile bits: iOS, Android, UWP.

As an added bonus, they've added Xamarin.Forms embedding into native interfaces.

It's actually major news since Xamarin.Forms would become the first cross platform UI toolkit that:

1. supports both desktop and mobiles

2. is backed by a major vendor

3. is truly usable from a memory managed language as part of the core offering

They plan to change it, from http://blog.xamarin.com/microsoft-and-xamarin-expand-global-partnership/

Free Xamarin Starter Edition for Visual Studio Users –
Today, Microsoft announced a new, free edition to Visual
Studio—Visual Studio Community. Visual Studio Community
contains support for extensions, which means it will be
Xamarin compatible with from day one. We want to help make
Visual Studio Community a tool for anyone to create native
apps for iOS and Android, so we are announcing our plans to
enable our freely available Xamarin Starter Edition to work
with Visual Studio Community. We are also doubling the size
limit on apps that can be created with Xamarin Starter Edition,
so that you can build even more capable apps for free.
This will be available in the coming weeks.

If going by the stats that Xamarin gave[1] for Dalvik versus Mono on Android 4.0, Dalvik is also much slower than Mono. Though obviously Xamarin is not the most independent source in the findings, but I would believe it to outperform Dalvik in my own uses of both it and Dalvik for Android apps (I bought a license for it 6 months ago).

There's also some results by Koush Dutta[1] (Cyanogenmod contributer and Clockwork Recovery developer) from 2009 showing similar findings, though obviously that's way old and before Dalvik had JIT added in Android 2.2. We had a discussion sometime ago about that article on hn as well[3]

[1] http://blog.xamarin.com/android-in-c-sharp/

[2] http://www.koushikdutta.com/2009/01/dalvik-vs-mono.html

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=421862

Xamarin actually ported Android to C#:

http://blog.xamarin.com/android-in-c-sharp/

And has some cute benchmarks to show off for it.

But go one more level deep: Despite Microsoft's Community Promise, many places and legal teams will still view a potential threat if MS has a copyright on APIs used in Mono (not to mention patents).

It's a great win-win for Microsoft. They get to trumpet their PR and gain face with open source people, as well as deflect some criticism. But they know it'll still not hurt them as much as if they officially blessed Mono with a full, proper, transitive license.