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> 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 difficul

> 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?
        pjmlp 13y ago
        Yes, you can either use QML or C++. http://qt.digia.com/qtmobile/?utm_campaign=qtprojectbanner http://qt.digia.com/qtmobile/?utm_campaign=qtprojectbanner
        13y ago
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.

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?
        pjmlp 13y ago
        Yes, you can either use QML or C++. http://qt.digia.com/qtmobile/?utm_campaign=qtprojectbanner http://qt.digia.com/qtmobile/?utm_campaign=qtprojectbanner
        13y ago

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.