6 ms·

Well, I sure hope Miguel gets a nice payday. He's built some really amazing tools over the years. If Microsoft does proceed, it is a sign that they want their

by judah 13y ago

Well, I sure hope Miguel gets a nice payday. He's built some really amazing tools over the years. If Microsoft does proceed, it is a sign that they want their tooling to extend to their competitors' mobile platforms, something that has got to be a difficult business decision in light of pushing their own mobile platform.

taspeotis 13y ago
> If Microsoft does proceed, it is a sign that they want their tooling to extend to their competitors' mobile platforms, something that has got to be a difficult business decision in light of pushing their own mobile platform. I'm not sure it would have been that difficult. Post-acquisition: instead of developing native with Objective-C and targeting only iOS or Java and targeting Android you can develop with C# and have a "native" experience on iOS/Android. The kicker is now Windows Phone/Windows Store is much more accessible to you [1]. It's lowering the barriers to mobile developers considering Windows. [1] If you go hard with the code sharing that MvvmCross facilitates [2] [3] you don't have to do that much more to support another platform than developing the native views and binding them to your view models. [2] Anecdote 1 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10224376/mvvmcross-experiences-hindsight-limitations http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10224376/mvvmcross-experi... "In fact 90% of the code is shared and easily testable." [3] Anecdote 2 I've used MvvmCross myself and I'd say that I've gotten to 70% code shared across multiple platforms.
- Taylorious 13y ago
  It's boggled my mind why Microsoft hasn't tried to buy Xamarin sooner to do something like this. If they give the tools away for free and provide good documentation, samples, and support they could attract a lot of developers. Hell, they could even give some sort of financial incentive to attract developers too. It's annoying enough to have to develop for iOS and Android, if you could do both at the same time with less effort AND get Windows phone support... well that's just a huge win win all around.
  - shaneofalltrad 13y ago
    Are you kidding me? There are so many better ways to code on multiple devices, and adding another abstract to an already complex ever-changing environment is a mistake. The only "financial incentive" is to deter programmers by the cost of VS and the lack of flexibility by changing languages into MS products. (i.e. TypeScript)
    - adamnemecek 13y ago
      > There are so many better ways to code on multiple devices. Such as?
      - philtar 13y ago
        Yeah I'm looking for a solution right now and would like to know the better alternatives that give me native apps.
        pjmlp 13y ago
        Qt/C++ for one.
        sergiotapia 13y ago
        lol
        pjmlp 13y ago
        You LOL, I deliver applications. To each its own.
        mands 13y ago
        Interesting. How does the Qt approach compare to Mono for mobile development? I presume Qt apps use Qt's built-in UI rendering, with QML for any UI-logic. Slightly different to MVVM in Mono where you recreate native UI's on each platform, but also hopefully means you only need to create the UI once?
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  Bingo. Develop in Visual Studio using Xamarin for iOS and Android while writing in C#, now the incremental cost to also developing for WinPhone is much, much lower. And by owning these tools, as well as the WinPhone platform, Microsoft can make that increment almost arbitrarily small.
  - InclinedPlane 13y ago
    P.S. Dev Tools are a billion dollar business at MS, the move toward mobile development has pushed a lot of devs away from MS's tool stack. If they can push people back toward Visual Studio and C# and so forth then that is a huge win for MS, independent of whether they increase development for WinPhone.
  - rbanffy 13y ago
    > Develop in Visual Studio using Xamarin for iOS and Android while writing in C#, now the incremental cost to also developing for WinPhone is much, much lower You are counting the cost delta between writing C# for iOS and Android, something that is not that common, and also writing for Windows Phone. Most teams I know of prefer to write their code using the native toolkits. For them, writing in C# would be an extra cost. Few see writing equivalent code in Objective-C and Java as prohibitive because it's very common to host the bulk of the functionality on servers and only run UI code on the mobile client. UI code has traditionally been non-portable. For those who are already writing their mobile apps in C# for whatever reason, porting to Windows Phone is already easier than porting from Objective-C or Java.
- nacs 13y ago
  Not exactly what you're asking for but Unity ( https://unity3d.com/ https://unity3d.com/ ) already allows you to write code in C# and publish to Windows/Mac/Linux but also iOS, Android and Windows Phone. It uses Mono and is intended for making games however.
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    And it uses an old Mono runtime from Novel days, because they don't want to pay for new licenses.
- tmarman 13y ago
  I think the shift towards cloud services is key here - just like today's OneNote announcement. But more than extending their tooling to competitor's platforms, I think this is a sneaky way to actually make their platform more viable. Microsoft has tried to pay individual developers to get them to develop for WP, but this is short-sighted and ultimately doesn't address the opportunity cost involved. There are a number of cross-platform mobile tools out there (PhoneGap/Cordova, Telerik Icenium, Xamarin, etc). For a small team, it's damn near impossible to maintain both Android and iOS, let alone Windows Phone. The fact that Xamarin is compiled to native code and built around Mono makes it a particularly interesting play, since it's probably better suited for games as compared to the HTML 5-based solutions. I evaluated, and liked, Xamarin a lot. As a .NET developer and part of a very small team, it made a ton of sense for me. The main issue was price - it's very expensive which kind of becomes cost prohibitive for the small team that it is a great fit for. If Microsoft buys Xamarin and builds it into Visual Studio (or gives it away as part of MSDN/BizSpark), all of a sudden you have a lot of people building mobile apps in C#/.NET - and targeting Windows Phone becomes much, much easier. Microsoft can't compete straight up with Android or iOS because it doesn't have the same audience that either of those platforms have. But providing tooling that makes our lives easier doing cross platform development is an ingenious trojan horse to getting people to be able to target Windows Phone as well.... or even Windows 8 for that matter since it's just the CLR at the end of the day. [1] http://tmarman.com/Blog/Post/ba9a711f-dcdb-40b5-bca9-ad6eb5b8ad58 http://tmarman.com/Blog/Post/ba9a711f-dcdb-40b5-bca9-ad6eb5b...
  - bugsense 13y ago
    You forgot that MS could also bundle Azure Mobile Services
    - 3825 13y ago
      The OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive) blog is on Azure and is built on WordPress. You can reach http://blog.onedrive.com/ http://blog.onedrive.com/ through http://onedrive-wp.azurewebsites.net/ http://onedrive-wp.azurewebsites.net/ While this isn't much, it tells that not everyone is completely infected with not invented here (NIH) at Microsoft.
jason_slack 13y ago
well, there are other OSS figures there too. Nat Friedman...
keithwarren 13y ago
If you know Miguel, a big payday is not his motivation.
- jezell 13y ago
  Yet he did ditch the fully open source approach they had going before with Mono... Xamarin Studio isn't exactly cheap. He certainly prefers making money to running a charity.
- aespinoza 13y ago
  I agree. But a big payday would allow Miguel and Nat to improve their contributions to open source.
thatthatis 13y ago
It makes strategic sense when they're in 3rd place and theyre buying a cross platform tool that is about an order of magnitude better than any of the others. Because theyre in 3rd place, theres basically zero cannibalization cost and only the potential upside of "owning the cross platform framework (i.e. the java) of mobile" As I've said before: I want to live in a world where ms buys xamarin, open sources or provides the software for nearly free. Ms could plausibly win the app wars this way, and by extension mobile. Of the three/four mobile languages C# is tied with JavaScript for the one I'd most like to spend my weeks working in, and alone in first for the one id most like to mentor a child in. "code for windows phone, get iOS and android for nearly free" is an extremely compelling proposition. What makes this not a strategic disaster like OS/2 or android on bberry in my opinion is 1) it is a 3 legged race not a 2 way race and 2) it is a "write in our language, we'll compile to the competitors" not a "we can run our competitors apps"
- deskamess 13y ago
  I am at a point where I am trying to decide on languages that are good for my 9 year old. C# is not a choice I had thought of; more Scratch and some online tutorials using Ruby. I have access to C# at home and use it at work so that makes it a candidate, but what is your motivation for C# for children? I would not mind going down that path. Do you envision coupling it with other apps or resources? What would be your approach in the introduction stages? Thanks in advance.
  - thatthatis 13y ago
    I would only choose c# for children if my choices were c#, objectiveC, java, or JavaScript. My rationale for that preference is fairly simple: it is, to me, the most expressive. Thus I can focus on teaching concepts over syntax.
- tbyehl 13y ago
  > As I've said before: I want to live in a world where ms buys xamarin, open sources or provides the software for nearly free I want to live in a world where Mono implements the full .NET Framework and I can run PowerShell scripts on Linux. Somehow I doubt that is part of Microsoft's plan here :-(
jasallen 13y ago
I sure hope Miguel stays. He's not a cultural fit for old Microsoft, but maybe ushering the new guard.... Him and Gu? Beautiful music.
- scholia 13y ago
  "Working together with Microsoft's .NET team in the last four months has been an absolute delight. So excited about the future." https://twitter.com/migueldeicaza/status/445681543781285889 https://twitter.com/migueldeicaza/status/445681543781285889

by judah 13y ago

taspeotis 13y ago

> If Microsoft does proceed, it is a sign that they want their tooling to extend to their competitors' mobile platforms, something that has got to be a difficult business decision in light of pushing their own mobile platform. I'm not sure it would have been that difficult. Post-acquisition: instead of developing native with Objective-C and targeting only iOS or Java and targeting Android you can develop with C# and have a "native" experience on iOS/Android. The kicker is now Windows Phone/Windows Store is much more accessible to you [1]. It's lowering the barriers to mobile developers considering Windows. [1] If you go hard with the code sharing that MvvmCross facilitates [2] [3] you don't have to do that much more to support another platform than developing the native views and binding them to your view models. [2] Anecdote 1 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10224376/mvvmcross-experiences-hindsight-limitations http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10224376/mvvmcross-experi... "In fact 90% of the code is shared and easily testable." [3] Anecdote 2 I've used MvvmCross myself and I'd say that I've gotten to 70% code shared across multiple platforms.

Taylorious 13y ago
It's boggled my mind why Microsoft hasn't tried to buy Xamarin sooner to do something like this. If they give the tools away for free and provide good documentation, samples, and support they could attract a lot of developers. Hell, they could even give some sort of financial incentive to attract developers too. It's annoying enough to have to develop for iOS and Android, if you could do both at the same time with less effort AND get Windows phone support... well that's just a huge win win all around.
- shaneofalltrad 13y ago
  Are you kidding me? There are so many better ways to code on multiple devices, and adding another abstract to an already complex ever-changing environment is a mistake. The only "financial incentive" is to deter programmers by the cost of VS and the lack of flexibility by changing languages into MS products. (i.e. TypeScript)
  - adamnemecek 13y ago
    > There are so many better ways to code on multiple devices. Such as?
    - philtar 13y ago
      Yeah I'm looking for a solution right now and would like to know the better alternatives that give me native apps.
      - pjmlp 13y ago
        Qt/C++ for one.
        sergiotapia 13y ago
        lol
        pjmlp 13y ago
        You LOL, I deliver applications. To each its own.
        mands 13y ago
        Interesting. How does the Qt approach compare to Mono for mobile development? I presume Qt apps use Qt's built-in UI rendering, with QML for any UI-logic. Slightly different to MVVM in Mono where you recreate native UI's on each platform, but also hopefully means you only need to create the UI once?
InclinedPlane 13y ago
Bingo. Develop in Visual Studio using Xamarin for iOS and Android while writing in C#, now the incremental cost to also developing for WinPhone is much, much lower. And by owning these tools, as well as the WinPhone platform, Microsoft can make that increment almost arbitrarily small.
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  P.S. Dev Tools are a billion dollar business at MS, the move toward mobile development has pushed a lot of devs away from MS's tool stack. If they can push people back toward Visual Studio and C# and so forth then that is a huge win for MS, independent of whether they increase development for WinPhone.
- rbanffy 13y ago
  > Develop in Visual Studio using Xamarin for iOS and Android while writing in C#, now the incremental cost to also developing for WinPhone is much, much lower You are counting the cost delta between writing C# for iOS and Android, something that is not that common, and also writing for Windows Phone. Most teams I know of prefer to write their code using the native toolkits. For them, writing in C# would be an extra cost. Few see writing equivalent code in Objective-C and Java as prohibitive because it's very common to host the bulk of the functionality on servers and only run UI code on the mobile client. UI code has traditionally been non-portable. For those who are already writing their mobile apps in C# for whatever reason, porting to Windows Phone is already easier than porting from Objective-C or Java.
nacs 13y ago
Not exactly what you're asking for but Unity ( https://unity3d.com/ https://unity3d.com/ ) already allows you to write code in C# and publish to Windows/Mac/Linux but also iOS, Android and Windows Phone. It uses Mono and is intended for making games however.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  And it uses an old Mono runtime from Novel days, because they don't want to pay for new licenses.
tmarman 13y ago
I think the shift towards cloud services is key here - just like today's OneNote announcement. But more than extending their tooling to competitor's platforms, I think this is a sneaky way to actually make their platform more viable. Microsoft has tried to pay individual developers to get them to develop for WP, but this is short-sighted and ultimately doesn't address the opportunity cost involved. There are a number of cross-platform mobile tools out there (PhoneGap/Cordova, Telerik Icenium, Xamarin, etc). For a small team, it's damn near impossible to maintain both Android and iOS, let alone Windows Phone. The fact that Xamarin is compiled to native code and built around Mono makes it a particularly interesting play, since it's probably better suited for games as compared to the HTML 5-based solutions. I evaluated, and liked, Xamarin a lot. As a .NET developer and part of a very small team, it made a ton of sense for me. The main issue was price - it's very expensive which kind of becomes cost prohibitive for the small team that it is a great fit for. If Microsoft buys Xamarin and builds it into Visual Studio (or gives it away as part of MSDN/BizSpark), all of a sudden you have a lot of people building mobile apps in C#/.NET - and targeting Windows Phone becomes much, much easier. Microsoft can't compete straight up with Android or iOS because it doesn't have the same audience that either of those platforms have. But providing tooling that makes our lives easier doing cross platform development is an ingenious trojan horse to getting people to be able to target Windows Phone as well.... or even Windows 8 for that matter since it's just the CLR at the end of the day. [1] http://tmarman.com/Blog/Post/ba9a711f-dcdb-40b5-bca9-ad6eb5b8ad58 http://tmarman.com/Blog/Post/ba9a711f-dcdb-40b5-bca9-ad6eb5b...
- bugsense 13y ago
  You forgot that MS could also bundle Azure Mobile Services
  - 3825 13y ago
    The OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive) blog is on Azure and is built on WordPress. You can reach http://blog.onedrive.com/ http://blog.onedrive.com/ through http://onedrive-wp.azurewebsites.net/ http://onedrive-wp.azurewebsites.net/ While this isn't much, it tells that not everyone is completely infected with not invented here (NIH) at Microsoft.

jason_slack 13y ago

well, there are other OSS figures there too. Nat Friedman...

keithwarren 13y ago

If you know Miguel, a big payday is not his motivation.

jezell 13y ago
Yet he did ditch the fully open source approach they had going before with Mono... Xamarin Studio isn't exactly cheap. He certainly prefers making money to running a charity.
aespinoza 13y ago
I agree. But a big payday would allow Miguel and Nat to improve their contributions to open source.

thatthatis 13y ago

It makes strategic sense when they're in 3rd place and theyre buying a cross platform tool that is about an order of magnitude better than any of the others. Because theyre in 3rd place, theres basically zero cannibalization cost and only the potential upside of "owning the cross platform framework (i.e. the java) of mobile" As I've said before: I want to live in a world where ms buys xamarin, open sources or provides the software for nearly free. Ms could plausibly win the app wars this way, and by extension mobile. Of the three/four mobile languages C# is tied with JavaScript for the one I'd most like to spend my weeks working in, and alone in first for the one id most like to mentor a child in. "code for windows phone, get iOS and android for nearly free" is an extremely compelling proposition. What makes this not a strategic disaster like OS/2 or android on bberry in my opinion is 1) it is a 3 legged race not a 2 way race and 2) it is a "write in our language, we'll compile to the competitors" not a "we can run our competitors apps"

deskamess 13y ago
I am at a point where I am trying to decide on languages that are good for my 9 year old. C# is not a choice I had thought of; more Scratch and some online tutorials using Ruby. I have access to C# at home and use it at work so that makes it a candidate, but what is your motivation for C# for children? I would not mind going down that path. Do you envision coupling it with other apps or resources? What would be your approach in the introduction stages? Thanks in advance.
- thatthatis 13y ago
  I would only choose c# for children if my choices were c#, objectiveC, java, or JavaScript. My rationale for that preference is fairly simple: it is, to me, the most expressive. Thus I can focus on teaching concepts over syntax.
tbyehl 13y ago
> As I've said before: I want to live in a world where ms buys xamarin, open sources or provides the software for nearly free I want to live in a world where Mono implements the full .NET Framework and I can run PowerShell scripts on Linux. Somehow I doubt that is part of Microsoft's plan here :-(

jasallen 13y ago

I sure hope Miguel stays. He's not a cultural fit for old Microsoft, but maybe ushering the new guard.... Him and Gu? Beautiful music.

scholia 13y ago
"Working together with Microsoft's .NET team in the last four months has been an absolute delight. So excited about the future." https://twitter.com/migueldeicaza/status/445681543781285889 https://twitter.com/migueldeicaza/status/445681543781285889