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Whats the story with Xamarin now? Does it have a present/future?

by publicola1990 6y ago

andix 6y ago
There are two sides of Xamarin. It builds native apps and you can use their native UI systems. So you can build a native Android UI and a native iOS UI next to each other. This will give you perfectly native apps with the ability to share as much code as possible. The other side is Xamarin.Forms and its designated successor MAUI. Here you have the typical Microsoft UI problem. It is quite an unfinished framework. You can build everything with it, but if you do something else than the showcase app, you are going to have a difficult time. Xamarin is for sure not going to die soon.
- Yuioup 6y ago
  Xamarin.Forms isn't just unfinished. It's total garbage. Plus you can't share UI code between Android and iOS. You still need to build the UI's natively with no code reuse. Plus building and cross-compiling between Windows and Mac is hacky and painfully slow. I wish Microsoft would get rid of Xamarin. Every Visual Studio update has a bugfix for it, usually relating to iOS.
  - eddhead 6y ago
    It's 100% UI code reuse between both platforms and MAUI takes it up to Mac and Windows. I've delivered several apps with more then hundred thousand users and the turnaround time for XF apps is generally 3-4x faster than native. You don't know what you're talking about clearly.
    - TrueGeek 6y ago
      Same. OP says "going to die soon" of a framework that's been around for 9 years and is being invested in heavily. I've been working on Xamarin projects for years and have done very well with it. Doing consulting I've done plenty of projects in React Native and played with Flutter a bit but Xamarin really is a great framework.
  - miffy900 6y ago
    > Plus you can't share UI code between Android and iOS. You still need to build the UI's natively with no code reuse. Utterly false - Xamarin Forms is totally cross-platform UI; you're probably mistaking it for Xamarin Native, which is used as a target renderer for each platform. Look at this sample project: https://github.com/xamarin/xamarin-forms-samples/tree/master/TipCalc/TipCalc https://github.com/xamarin/xamarin-forms-samples/tree/master... The .iOS and .Android project folders target each platform respectively, with a single project shared between them that defines UI that is rendered onto each platform. You claim to have experience with using it, but obviously haven't done anything even as simple as a HelloWorld.
DiabloD3 6y ago
Xamarin was a company that produced several things. The AOT toolchain was fully integrated as a first party part of .NET 5.0. Site note: 5 eliminates "framework" and "core"; 5 is technically a descendent of the core family (also skipping 4.x versioning, as it overlaps with framework 4.x), but satisfies all the requirements of apps that use framework 4.x. Ergo, "framework" is available on non-Windows targets and you no longer need to choose. Xamarin also produced an entire UI framework. WinUI 3 (/w MAUI for non-Windows) is the intended upgrade path of Xamarin Forms, while the rest of Xamarin UI that isn't part of Forms lives on either in WinUI 3 or has designated replacements. In many cases, the upgrade is merely changing your `using` lines. Side note: Uno has been using non-Forms Xamarin UI like this for years, substituting Xamarin's functionality when you're not on Windows.
WorldMaker 6y ago
Xamarin is merging into .NET with .NET 6. MAUI is the new name/brand of what used to be Xamarin.Forms the cross-platform UI toolkit. The rest of Xamarin, the "binding glue" to build .NET applications for Android and iOS is now just "profiles"/"targets" of .NET 6 itself: net6.0-android and net6.0-ios.
- publicola1990 6y ago
  That sounds a like a good thing, but really I'm not hearing any buzz about it here or in other tech news sources.
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    Obviously I don't know what you are reading, but I've seen a lot of buzz about MAUI (including this article we are commenting on) since last BUILD when it was announced. Some of my "enterprise" dark matter feeds have been extremely excited at the idea that Xamarin.Forms is moving into System.* namespaces in .NET and what that means for certain types of very conservative enterprise adoption (it no longer looks like a 3rd party option with a weird brand; it's "real" .NET top to bottom). The other part isn't getting as much buzz ("Xamarin is now just a 'compiler feature' of .NET 6+"), in part because it does seem somewhat "anti-news", it's not a new brand like MAUI or new buzzwords, it's just feature check boxes in a list. That said, you can tell it was a lot of hard work technically and I know a bunch of developers that are excited that there's just one unified tool stack now (you can use the CLI `dotnet` for everything that Xamarin used to do; Visual Studio has some updates to make everything feel even more seamless than it used to, including a lot more improvements to single project multi-targeting instead of needing to create a project per target OS/hardware). That buzz is out there on social media, at least, if it isn't making huge splashes in news sources.

Whats the story with Xamarin now? Does it have a present/future?

There are two sides of Xamarin. It builds native apps and you can use their native UI systems. So you can build a native Android UI and a native iOS UI next to each other. This will give you perfectly native apps with the ability to share as much code as possible. The other side is Xamarin.Forms and its designated successor MAUI. Here you have the typical Microsoft UI problem. It is quite an unfinished framework. You can build everything with it, but if you do something else than the showcase app, you are going to have a difficult time. Xamarin is for sure not going to die soon.

Yuioup 6y ago
Xamarin.Forms isn't just unfinished. It's total garbage. Plus you can't share UI code between Android and iOS. You still need to build the UI's natively with no code reuse. Plus building and cross-compiling between Windows and Mac is hacky and painfully slow. I wish Microsoft would get rid of Xamarin. Every Visual Studio update has a bugfix for it, usually relating to iOS.
- eddhead 6y ago
  It's 100% UI code reuse between both platforms and MAUI takes it up to Mac and Windows. I've delivered several apps with more then hundred thousand users and the turnaround time for XF apps is generally 3-4x faster than native. You don't know what you're talking about clearly.
  - TrueGeek 6y ago
    Same. OP says "going to die soon" of a framework that's been around for 9 years and is being invested in heavily. I've been working on Xamarin projects for years and have done very well with it. Doing consulting I've done plenty of projects in React Native and played with Flutter a bit but Xamarin really is a great framework.
- miffy900 6y ago
  > Plus you can't share UI code between Android and iOS. You still need to build the UI's natively with no code reuse. Utterly false - Xamarin Forms is totally cross-platform UI; you're probably mistaking it for Xamarin Native, which is used as a target renderer for each platform. Look at this sample project: https://github.com/xamarin/xamarin-forms-samples/tree/master/TipCalc/TipCalc https://github.com/xamarin/xamarin-forms-samples/tree/master... The .iOS and .Android project folders target each platform respectively, with a single project shared between them that defines UI that is rendered onto each platform. You claim to have experience with using it, but obviously haven't done anything even as simple as a HelloWorld.

DiabloD3 6y ago

Xamarin was a company that produced several things. The AOT toolchain was fully integrated as a first party part of .NET 5.0. Site note: 5 eliminates "framework" and "core"; 5 is technically a descendent of the core family (also skipping 4.x versioning, as it overlaps with framework 4.x), but satisfies all the requirements of apps that use framework 4.x. Ergo, "framework" is available on non-Windows targets and you no longer need to choose. Xamarin also produced an entire UI framework. WinUI 3 (/w MAUI for non-Windows) is the intended upgrade path of Xamarin Forms, while the rest of Xamarin UI that isn't part of Forms lives on either in WinUI 3 or has designated replacements. In many cases, the upgrade is merely changing your `using` lines. Side note: Uno has been using non-Forms Xamarin UI like this for years, substituting Xamarin's functionality when you're not on Windows.

WorldMaker 6y ago

Xamarin is merging into .NET with .NET 6. MAUI is the new name/brand of what used to be Xamarin.Forms the cross-platform UI toolkit. The rest of Xamarin, the "binding glue" to build .NET applications for Android and iOS is now just "profiles"/"targets" of .NET 6 itself: net6.0-android and net6.0-ios.

publicola1990 6y ago
That sounds a like a good thing, but really I'm not hearing any buzz about it here or in other tech news sources.
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  Obviously I don't know what you are reading, but I've seen a lot of buzz about MAUI (including this article we are commenting on) since last BUILD when it was announced. Some of my "enterprise" dark matter feeds have been extremely excited at the idea that Xamarin.Forms is moving into System.* namespaces in .NET and what that means for certain types of very conservative enterprise adoption (it no longer looks like a 3rd party option with a weird brand; it's "real" .NET top to bottom). The other part isn't getting as much buzz ("Xamarin is now just a 'compiler feature' of .NET 6+"), in part because it does seem somewhat "anti-news", it's not a new brand like MAUI or new buzzwords, it's just feature check boxes in a list. That said, you can tell it was a lot of hard work technically and I know a bunch of developers that are excited that there's just one unified tool stack now (you can use the CLI `dotnet` for everything that Xamarin used to do; Visual Studio has some updates to make everything feel even more seamless than it used to, including a lot more improvements to single project multi-targeting instead of needing to create a project per target OS/hardware). That buzz is out there on social media, at least, if it isn't making huge splashes in news sources.