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As someone who works in .NET ecosystem, this is HUGE. I think there is huge synergy [1] to be exploited by combining Xamarin's team with language/compiler desi
by solutionyogi 11y ago
As someone who works in .NET ecosystem, this is HUGE.
I think there is huge synergy [1] to be exploited by combining Xamarin's team with language/compiler design/visual studio team. I think MS is extremely well positioned to be a leading development platform across desktop/web/mobile in the enterprise space with this acquisition.
[1] Never thought I would ever use that word in a comment.
- Avalaxy 11y agoYes indeed, right now Xamarin is very very buggy and also pretty slow. I think the software will get MUCH better if the teams at Microsoft will start working on it.
- niels_olson 11y agoor its embrace extend extinguish?
- shanselman 11y agoNonsense. The last 5 years show it's a whole new Microsoft. Disclaimer: I have been one of the ones pushing the last 5 years to make that statement true. ;)
- enraged_camel 11y ago>>Nonsense. The last 5 years show it's a whole new Microsoft Yeah, that's why Windows 10 sends all your data to Microsoft by default and Windows updates no longer come with detailed explanations of what is in them. /s edit: judging by the downvotes, there's a surprising number of Microsoft fanboys here. I guess all they had to do to win people over was make a few token contributions to the open-source community...
- jongalloway2 11y agohttp://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10/update-history-windows-10 http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10/update-history...
- TylerH 11y agoWell they did fire all their technical writers; they kinda had to stop writing those updates when there was no one to write them.
- RyanZAG 11y agoNah, nobody in the open source community really cares about them. HN is heavily used by Microsoft employees - and they are legion. That's all you're seeing here.
- phatfish 11y agoThe Windows 10 privacy issues really do leave a bad taste, and I will be sticking to Windows 7/8.1 for as long as I can. There is a reason there are free upgrades to 10 being pushed so hard, and it's not because they are feeling nice. It seems like they are giving with one hand (open source to developers) and taking with the other (data from their unsuspecting users).
- Koshkin 11y ago> sticking to Windows 7/8.1 Well, you know, you can't walk into the same Windows twice. (Unless you ignore all updates.)
- discordance 11y agoDo you also use only DuckDuckGo?
- mixedCase 11y agoThere are different expectations for the Internet and the software that runs your hardware.
- teh_klev 11y ago> judging by the downvotes, there's a surprising number of Microsoft fanboys here. Seriously, do we need to lower the content level of discussion here to "fanboy" camp accusations, it's not productive. Also, please review the guidelines: Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downvote you or announce that you expect to get downvoted. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- a_guideline 11y agoPlease don't regurgitate guidelines that long term users know and deliberately ignore.
- enraged_camel 11y agoPlease stop backseat modding. If you have a problem with a comment, flag it and it will be reviewed. Thanks.
- dang 11y agoteh_kiev was right, and reminding fellow users of the guidelines is fine. I wish users would do it more. Indeed I was just about to post the following in reply to your comment above: Please don't add meta commentary about downvotes and who you imagine downvoted you. It's against the HN guidelines (two of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and is invariably tedious.
- fsloth 11y agoWindows 10 privacy settings and .Net as a viable technology platform from licencing and technology point of view are two different things, though. "The different Microsoft" aspect comes from open sourcing the key technological components so migration away from Microsoft licenses is at least a legally plausible, and that people can indeed see what goes into the sausage. From developers point of view this is a huge improvement and makes the .Net a much more appealing proposition. Is a company evil? Does it make good products? To me, at least, it's not very helpful to mix these two discussions.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- pekk 11y agoExcept for Microsoft's lawyers who are still using patents against Linux. Same old Microsoft. Is it even possible for you guys to kill the undead SCO monster now? At any rate, it's still working away.
- niels_olson 11y agoI look forward to that. However, after 20 years of bad behavior, it's not unfair to be guarded for a long time after that. Does cancer relapse? Does alcoholism relapse? How about the politics of Russia? How long did democracy last? I applaud your efforts. The road is yet long.
- bachmeier 11y agoEEE only works if you're a monopolist. Microsoft in 2016 is so far from being a monopolist that they can't even see monopoly from where they are. Xamarin is just another tool, so it's not clear what Microsoft would gain from extinguishing it.
- jenscow 11y agoToday you can target all three platforms...
- scholia 11y agoIt's actually after 15 or more years of generally good behaviour. After the anti-trust case, Microsoft spent a decade under the close supervision of the US DoJ, as well as the supervision of the EU (with an eye to imposing large fines if possible). I expect it's done things you (and me) don't like in the past 15 years. However, the same goes for Apple, Google, IBM and Oracle. Microsoft hasn't been the least ethical of that lot.
- XzetaU8 11y ago"A newsletter entry dated 26 December 2012 states: "MS [Microsoft], working with the FBI, developed a surveillance capability to deal" with the issue. "These solutions were successfully tested and went live 12 Dec 2012." http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user-data http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-c... Noticed how this date is withing those 5 year of "It's a whole new Microsoft" mantra you guys chanting over and over?
- hobs 11y agoThanks Scott, I have kept up on your work and blog and I wanted to say I appreciate what you do. There could be many ways to undo the good things MS has done recently, and they are not perfect, but I am much happier the direction in the past year than I have been since the start of the company.
- hh2222 11y agoIt worries me more that Microsoft has a track record of abandoning developer tools for the next shiny thing.
- maxxxxx 11y agoSame here. I wouldn't be surprised if Xamarin died slowly.
- sossles 11y agoThat makes no sense. It's pretty clear that .NET is Microsoft's future, and Xamarin extends the reach of .NET.
- maxxxxx 11y agoLook at Winforms, WPF and Silverlight. They are all .Net and all abandoned. I wouldn't bet my long term future on Xamarin.
- jimmcslim 11y agoYes, Silverlight has been abandoned. I would argue that Winforms is now a mature technology and requires little upkeep, but it is still a part of the stack. WPF development has slowed significantly, but still proceeds.
- maxxxxx 11y agoNone of these are good technologies if you want to stay up-to-date. You could also write your site in IE6 compatible HTML which was quite mature but that seems a really bad idea.
- KirinDave 11y agoThat's not a reasonable comparison at all. Winforms is maintained. IE6 is explicitly deprecated.
- sigzero 11y agoNonsense. The last 5 years shows that Microsoft isn't quite sure about it yet. Better? Yes. A "whole new Microsoft"? No.
- HeavyStorm 11y agoFacts?
- jordz 11y agoSuch win Scott.
- nitrogen 11y agoWith respect to the progress made by some MS divisions (and the people pushing for it), it seems not all of MS is keeping up. For example, this was on HN today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11167964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11167964 It's hard to trust that the currently good sides of MS will be allowed to stay good while other sides of MS are still behaving badly.
- mistermann 11y agoScott, any word on the inside on whether Excel is going to ever get some major enhancements? The object model desperately needs an improvement, and the ability to write VBA with C# would be spectacular.
- shanselman 11y agoNot sure I understand. You've been able to make C# Excel Addins for a long time now (file new | office addin) and you can also write add-ins in JavaScript as well.
- mistermann 11y agoSorry, I was referring to VBA macros.
- OJFord 11y agoSkype? Sunrise?
- cbd1984 11y agoYep, now they show full-screen ads on the OS itself. Huge improvement. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11167964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11167964 I'm sure there are Officially no privacy implications here.
- littlegreenb18 11y agoThat doesn't apply here. This is a strategic purchase for Microsoft. They have no competing technology. That was in reference to standards. Microsoft wanted to turn open standards into proprietary standards to drive people toward their products.
- Sir_Substance 11y ago...Xamarin studio isn't a competitor to Visual Studio? That's all I know that Xamarin makes, so I think this article is going a bit over my head, but it'll be a shame if I suddenly need a Microsoft account to use it. I do like diversity in my language tooling.
- hokkos 11y agoVisual Studio doesn't run on Mac OS to make iOS apps, VS Code is still only an editor not an IDE. So Xamarin could be very useful for MS.
- Sir_Substance 11y agoI'm not debating that Xamarins products are useful to Microsoft, I'm questioning the assertion that they haven't just consumed a competitor.
- mynameisvlad 11y agoConsidering Microsoft has no Mac IDE, I'm not sure how Xamarin could be considered a competitor.
- Sir_Substance 11y ago...because Visual Studio is a C#/C++ IDE that works on Windows, and Xamarin Studio is also a C#/C++ IDE that works on Windows? Xamarin Studio is a swiss army knife. I don't know about your use case, but I use it under the name Monodevelop on linux (not really sure what that association is) and as Xamarin studio on windows. For my use case, it's a C# and C++ IDE for desktop development, same as visual studio. It's certainly not a MacOS only product, it supports all three platforms including windows.
- devrelm 11y agoWhy would MS want to extinguish a successful technology that they just bought?
- RandomBK 11y agoEmbrace a new technology Extend with proprietary functionality Extinguish the competition
- BinaryIdiot 11y agoEven though it's based on Microsoft's existing technology? That saying just doesn't make sense here...
- threeseed 11y agoYou make absolutely no sense. The competition for .Net isn't Xamarin. It's the Java platform.
- craigvn 11y agoMaybe their strategy is to bundle the Bing toolbar with the Xamarin installer.
- jenscow 11y agoI thought that with Skype, then Nokia.
- sirkneeland 11y agoNokia was not successful (by any definition of the word) by the time Microsoft bought it.
- gnoway 11y agoThat's true, they weren't. Several years before that purchase, Stephen Elop (an MS executive) became CEO of Nokia. Within 6 months of his hire, Nokia signed an agreement with MS to sell Windows Phone devices; the classic Symbian OS and the Linux-based Meego - both of which had shipping hardware - were canceled in favor of exclusive focus on Windows Phone. Within the next few years, Nokia laid off over 20k people, their stock dropped by about 85%, and they even sold and then leased back their HQ in Finland. They were a lot less successful by that point, and a lot less expensive to purchase. Which Microsoft did. There was some amount of controversy associated with the above.
- jongalloway2 11y agoTime to first EEE response: 20 minutes
- hockeybias 11y agoYea... I'm pretty sure they recognize mobile as a lot of hype. Sheeeeeeeesh....
- forgotAgain 11y agoWhile I don't believe its a whole new Microsoft, the idea of embrace, extend, extinguish in this context is knee jerk nay-saying. What are they going to extinguish: iOS or Android?
- michaelwww 11y agoIt's curious to me how some people don't update their thinking. Microsoft is so far from being the dominate software behemoth that practiced EEE that's it's almost sad. The old Microsoft paid a price for that arrogant attitude of theirs that led them to make some bad decisions that got them to their reduced status today. I applaud efforts by the new crew to turn things around.
- luckydata 11y agothere's nothing to extinguish here, just a clever but buggy technology that never took off.
- aespinoza 11y agoXamarin actually works quite well. Microsoft will definitely bring in more quality as they have huge amounts of resources not only in cash but in talented people. This news is important because it solidifies the future of the .Net ecosystem in iOS, OSX, Android, Linux and Windows. The Xamarin team has been doing a great job, but I am pretty sure that with Microsoft backing them they'll do a way better job.
- ta_donk_gt 11y ago"Works quite well" is a phrase I've never used with Xamarin. I stopped using it about a year ago for two reasons: (1) _every_single_release_ would break my apps and would then require spending inordinate amounts of time trying to get things building again, and (2) I could no longer justify paying for the professional edition just to be able to use Visual Studio on my hobby projects. I am very much hoping that both of these issues are addressed with this acquisition, and like many, I have been holding out for a while now hoping this would happen. EDIT: pjmlp, can't reply to your comment directly: You are talking about the Indie edition, with which you cannot use Visual Studio. Using Visual Studio requires the professional edition, at $999/platform/year. Even with the discount they gave me, the thousands of dollars I spent just to do hobby projects was a mistake.
- douche 11y agoYeah, that thousand dollar per developer price tag is a little steep. I built out a cool little proof of concept app in it last year on a trial license, but it was just not worth it to go in at that price on it, when a mobile client would effectively just be a free feature for us. Using one of the webview wrappers was the better decision at that time.
- HeavyStorm 11y agoPer developer per platform. Two guys developing for ios and Android would pay 2k every month. Add the damn exchange rate (I live in a 3rd world country), and the price is blocking for anything but enterprise development. I just abandoned it for Ionic after pitching the product to my peers for two years. Let's just hope that MSFT indeed add it to Visual Studio without any additional costs.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- sliverstorm 11y agoNever thought I would ever use that word in a comment. You either die a developer or live long enough to see yourself become the manager?
- fancy_pantser 11y agoYou're assuming this won't be the "before" post in a post on ourincrediblejourney.
- Scarbutt 11y agoVery HUGE, now microsoft can put ads on xamarin software!
- junto 11y agoHave you ever seen an advert in any of their developer tools? Or are you just being flippant?
- wangii 11y agoever downloaded Oracle JDK?
- cwyers 11y agoMicrosoft doesn't make that.
- Cheezmeister 11y agoThank God. Can you imagine?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- pjmlp 11y agoThis is great! Also it will give even a greater boost to .NET usage on mobile platforms for cross platform code.
- tmarman 11y agoThis makes me happy, and hopefully it's just available as a base part of Visual Studio / part of all MSDN subscriptions. I loved Xamarin in principle before, but the price tag was steep. I inherited a Xamarin app on one project - and while there were certainly some issues here and there, the promise of native cross-platform app development and shared C# libraries is pretty compelling. I said a few years ago that this should happen, so glad to see it actually come to pass! http://tmarman.com/Blog/Post/ba9a711f-dcdb-40b5-bca9-ad6eb5b8ad58 http://tmarman.com/Blog/Post/ba9a711f-dcdb-40b5-bca9-ad6eb5b...
- hipsterrific 11y agoI wouldn't be surprised if they give it away for free. Microsoft has other revenue streams that it can use (VS Pro, MSDN, Office, Mac Builds, Azure).