There's not enough overlap for MS to want to buy Xamarin to shut it down. This is them putting their money where their mouth is vis-a-vie .NET expansion plans.
Hopefully they'll keep Monodevelop under development, if they don't bring VS to Linux.
Microsoft is only a threat to JetBrains from where I'm standing and looking, I have a feeling they will fix up Xamarin the way we all hope they will. I really hope there will be a completely free option of Xamarin for Students and maybe even on BizSpark.
There is already a free option of Xamarin for students.[1] Earlier there used to be a separate application process but now it is rolled into DreamSpark
Or if they just release the Mono runtime under MIT (Mono requires all VM contributions to be licensed to them under MIT, they then turn around and release it under LGPLv2 and a commercial license - so it's legally doable without any effort). Microsoft's product strategy is getting .Net everywhere for free, making money on services and tooling - they don't need commercial Xamarin around to make their strategy work.
Congrats to Nat and Miguel! This seems to make a ton of sense, and unlike other acquisitions by big corps this seems like a great move for both Xamarin and their customers.
Wow! Congratulations Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza (of Ximian fame). I remember reading this blogpost like it was yesterday: http://nat.org/blog/2011/05/xamarin/
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.
Yes 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.
That 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.
...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.
...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.
Xamarin is not about Xamarin Studio. It's about the iOS and Android runtimes. Thanks to its ability to take full advantage of AOT compilation, the performance difference is staggering compared to Mono. Also it needs to JIT in less situations, which is a big plus on iOS since JITing is prohibited on that platform "for security reasons".
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.
Although technically MeeGo had no shipping hardware at the time. The N900 ran Maemo, the first (and sadly only) MeeGo hardware to ship to the public was the N9 which didn't ship until months after the "burning platform" announcement
>>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...
Nah, 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.
The 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).
teh_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) and is invariably tedious.
Windows 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.
I 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.
EEE 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.
It'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.
"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."
Thanks 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.
None 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.
Silverlight is abandoned, but Winforms (especially) and WPF are mature products; I use the latter two (as well as Xamarin for Mac) in my consulting business to make good profits each year, and don't see anything changing except for better in this respect.
Well, .NET has been around for 14 years now. There have been all kinds of worried predictions about Microsoft abandoning or doing evil things with .NET, but after 14 years they're starting to sound a bit less worrying.
Silverlight was essentially a polyfill for back when browsers weren't very capable. I did a ton of work with Silverlight - streaming video, vector graphics, cross-platform front-end apps with back-end integration... all stuff that was pretty hard to do back then, but is now widely available in all modern browsers.
Also, both the JavaScript language and runtime were pretty hard to build reliable, performant apps in back when Silverlight was introduced. The JavaScript language and runtimes have matured considerably since then.
If it had been my say, I'd have kept it for a little longer than they did, but by now I'd say it's no longer necessary.
There were always two camps in the Silverlight world, both inside and outside of Microsoft: those that saw it as a way to make browser-based applications more awesome, and those that saw Silverlight as a way to get away from that yucky HTML/CSS/JS dev. I was always firmly in the first camp, and from that side of things I wouldn't take back a minute I spent on Silverlight dev - I got a jump on video, vector graphics, browser-based apps, etc., long before it was practical to do that in the browser. When those technologies hit mainstream browsers, great!
Note: Microsoft employee but definitely only speaking for myself here.
Silverlight was competition to Flash. Once the standards were far enough along that it was clear plugins weren't going to be necessary, there was no reason to keep it alive. Honestly, you should be happy that Microsoft killed off theirs and decided to use open standards instead.
I'd counter that by stating that I work on a .NET codebase that dates back to 2003, it still builds just fine in Visual Studio 2015 and runs without issue on .NET 4.6/IIS8.5.
With 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
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.
Scott, 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.
Not 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.
While 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?
It'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.
Xamarin 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.
"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.
Yeah, 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.
Per 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.
It was the per platform pricing that killed it for me. I was so annoyed that a solution for multiplatform development made you pay twice.
I liked their T-Shirt promotion idea with the tshirt store demo, but that errored out on me and it was their code.
Having the experience of dealing with the Android NDK, JNI wrapping to be able to use C++ as portable code across Android and WP, I think the 25€ a month are quite reasonable for having someone else go through that pain for me.
Both points are endemic of smaller and newer companies (does xamarin still qualify?), poor legacy and deprecation strategies / product roadmap, bad pricing structure. I think Microsoft can aid in both categories.
This 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 wonder if it means a transition to Visual Studio Code at some point. I doubt it would happen soon, but I feel like there's a lot more support behind that IDE than MonoDevelop.
The vscode source is very well "layered". It's not totally inconceivable that the vscode folks or some other team take it and allow you to choose at build time whether to target it's current DOM-backed UI or one backed by more "native" drawing routines and widgets.
OmniSharp powered intellisense and other features are easy enough to stick in VS Code. It's easier to package and deploy than MonoDevelop. Much easier (at least for me) to write extensions for VS Code. I see it as a win-win. MonoDevelop has always been a frustrating experience for me. While VS Code isn't perfect, I'm less frustrated using it than MonoDevelop.
> MonoDevelop is a clone of Visual Studio written in C#
They might have great intentions with MonoDevelop when it first launched, but it has been lagging behind other IDEs forever. With things like IntelliJ Rider, this position is not going to improve.
From my perspective Microsoft has done more with Visual Studio Code since its release 10 months ago than MonoDevelop has done in a decade. I'd argue it's easier to extend VSC to use it for C# development (which it already supports [1]) than to get MonoDevelop on par with modern IDEs.
And despite being JS/TS, the IDE is very very fast.
It's weird to bring up slowness when VSCode is much more amenable for use on machines with meager specs than MonoDevelop is. Why do you care what language your editor is written in unless you're submitting patches, anyway?
I thought this was a forgone conclusion but I guess it never actually happened yet. Congrats to the team!
Wouldn't it be cool if they gave this same treatment to ReactOS down the road? I think Microsoft has woken up to the power of open source technologies.
This is giant news for the .NET ecosystem. It means that MS is serious about their push into Mobile and Linux, and that .NET developers aren't going to have to work with Xamarin's ever-so-slightly-behind libraries anymore. It also means that MS now produces an IDE on Linux, which is a crazy change from 10 years ago.
It's IDE-ish for some languages. I would call it a full-featured TypeScript IDE (with IntelliSense, syntax-checking, a decent debugger, etc) but not much else.
Yeah, it doesn't have debugging (of C# on Mac and Linux). I think the GP is referring to Xamarin Studio, which is an ok IDE, but pales in comparison to VS.
Visual Studio Code doesn't do an eighth of what VS 2015 does. VS 2015 on Linux with a full CLR would be huge. Think about the opportunities for existing enterprise programmers, alone.
It would be great to use Visual Studio on other platforms, but it's unlikely to happen any time soon (unless Microsoft have been working on it in secret). Visual Studio is a Win32 application, we haven't even seen a 64-bit version of it yet, I'd expect to see Visual Studio become a 64-bit WPF application before it becomes cross-platform.
Visual Studio already uses WPF where it matters (the actual editor is WPF, I think, among other things).
That said, the core and infrastructure and all the stuff that makes it run is still a radioactive COM wasteland, and from experience trying to write an extension once, you can tell..
It's a text editor though and doesn't focus on being a full featured IDE. I think a Cross Platform text editor is definitely a must have regardless though. I just wish it had debugging (or at least just execution) natively without me having to find a plugin, sort of how Geany runs / compiles anything I throw at it without much (if ever) effort.
It does have built-in debugging, although it might not support the targets you're working with. However, it is still less than a year old + only at version 0.10.x...
Visual Studio Code is very different from Visual Studio and was made exclusively to capture the unwashed masses of web developers that have been lead to believe by false prophets that they shall exclusively use 30 year old editors running in terminal emulators, themselves mimicking 40 year old interfaces, to accomplish their work.
The first web devs you're talking about are already using Atom and Sublime Text.
The other devs are still using a better terminal editor.
As a personal anecdote, I did give VSC a try when I had to write some TypeScript. Installed a couple of plugins for Neovim and I was both at home (which means, more productive) and still had the same functionality I used in VSC.
> It means that MS is serious about their push into Mobile and Linux
Mobile OK but Linux? Currently on the HN frontpage theres an article about how Skype for Linux hasn't been updated for years and "is unable to join calls": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11165568
What are they going to extinguish, Linux? By letting people write C# code on Linux? Or are they going to extinguish Java? Or are you saying they'll extinguish Xamarin? If that's the case, that doesn't make since because Xamarin isn't a competitor.
Microsoft is so far from having the capability of doing any of those things. Any company that has a monopoly starts acting evil, but Microsoft is no longer close to having monopoly.
They want devs to write for Linux because they are a services company who make money from Azure VMs including those that run Linux.
They don't want end users to run Linux desktop.
So devtools/languages/cloud divisions inside Microsoft like Linux.
Those in ms who deal with end user applications (home users in this case, as ms push Lync to business) probably see little point in investing in development in Skype for Linux.
This. MS want .Net to run on all platforms. Give developers awesome tooling for free. Let them build. When they deploy, pay for Azure. It has an ongoing usage cost. Xamarin is just part of their tooling.
Microsoft is a very big company. Just because devtools division is doing one thing doesn't mean the Skype team has the same priorities. I wouldn't even assume that half the product teams in MS are using MS dev tools to build their product.
When the integration is done, we'll have Dotnet Core targeting Windows, OSX, Linux, Android and iOS. There will be frameworks for serverside and clientside applications.
I think it can become the best alternative to the javascript world, which already can target all these, but needs all kinds of native support and is much less solid as a language.
If they could convince all browsers to host some version of the CLR so you could have IL and so (C#/VB.NET/F#) as a viable alternative to JavaScript then I would agree.
> I think it can become the best alternative to the javascript world
Ugh no. Professionally, I would have a lot to gain from that as a developer but in general that would be an awful turn of events. Long term it would be a net negative for the world and we all should know better by now.
I'm honestly amazed that it took this long. I've tried Xamarin before to make iOS apps but couldn't justify paying an ongoing subscription for what is basically a hobby project. I'd love it if MS expanded the "Starter Edition" to allow more fully fledged apps - they could be seriously competitive with Xcode.
I truly believe that it would've happened sooner, but Microsoft needed to wait until it had built up some degree of confidence among developers that the whole "new Microsoft" thing is for real. If they'd done it three years ago, everyone would've panicked, assumed that things like e.g. .NET on Linux were dead, and just written off Xamarin's offerings immediately. Now I think a lot of people are at least cautiously optimistic that Microsoft's cross-platform and OSS intentions are genuine.
You can see it right here in this thread: as another commenter said, not that long ago this news would've prompted universal predictions of doom, whereas now people seem thrilled. Timing is everything.
I imagine .NET devs around the world are rejoicing (myself included). I hope this means access to Xamarin through existing MSDN and BizSpark subscriptions.
Would be smart to release windows phone support for free, but IOS and android support costs. More windows phone apps for app store for no cost to developer.
If this doesn't work then it will get killed for something to replace it with. I haven't heard anyone speak highly of forms after the initial positive start.
Back when MS broadcasted OSX/nix compatibility for Visual Studio I felt it necessary to comment that .NET development has been supported in OSX/nix for over a decade.
In short, Miguel De Icaza should be awarded a medal from MS for his heroic effort in developing the Mono platform and tooling; in spite of the constant threat of legal action from Microsoft for 'patent infringement' of their supposedly 'open' (ie ECMA) standard languages and VM.
Hopefully, he finally receives public recognition and reward for all his hard work.
He'd been pretty buddy-buddy with Microsoft for a while. Microsoft has owned patents on the underlying technology, but as far as I'm aware they never did anything to indicate that they might sue Ximian or Xamarin. As far as I can tell, the bulk of the concern about Mono stems from FUD-spreading by RMS.
> they never did anything to indicate that they might sue Ximian or Xamarin.
That doesn't mean Microsoft would never sue them or their users. If a Fortune 500 company using Mono receives a letter from Microsoft, they'll act exactly the same as any Android manufacturer that received similar letters.
They aren't entirely invalid, though interestingly the only times something like this has ever happened were around that Java platform, not .NET. And yet, even though they're the ones who are notable for actually trying to do so, nobody worries too much about trusting Oracle not to try and torpedo any open source ecosystems for profit.
Which is why I'm inclined to think of it as FUD-spreading. It's not about a balanced assessment of the strategic risks involved in using a particular open source product so much as it's about how one company in particular has been mythologized into something approaching a Lovecraftian horror in the minds of many members of a particular subculture.
Luckily, we will be joining a new Microsoft (pending regulatory approval), one lead by Satya which has a different vision for the company. We are excited about what this means for Xamarin's products, for our customers, for our users, for our employees, but most of all, we are excited about what we can achieve inside Microsoft for all of Microsoft's customers, and the rapidly growing open source community around .NET.
Hopefully this means the .NET for Android and iOS solutions will become better supported and (maybe, I hope) free and open source like the rest of .NET is now. Maybe not, I doubt there's any profit in it for them (or maybe there is since they'd likely make it part of VS), but I'd really like to be able to take .NET for mobile development more seriously.
My coworkers and I have been predicting (and hoping for) this for a long time. It'll be interesting to see how this affects licensing costs, particularly for smaller teams. The per-year-per-platform license really turns me off as a solo dev.
How much? I know it's undisclosed but it would be very interesting. Hopefully someone leaks it.
The rumor was Miguel told MS to "F*#K Off" when MS presented him with an offer many years ago. This lead to CoreCLR being open sourced and Visual Studio Code being built.
I'd like to know if by undermining parts of Xamarins business they were able to get them at substantial discount - especially with the tech industry downturn. Or if failure in the Windows Phone market has made MS desperate and forced their hand. Given it's undisclosed I'm guessing it's the former. I'd like to know if telling MS to "F#&K Off" was a good strategy :)
>The rumor was Miguel told MS to "F&#K Off" when MS presented him with an offer many years ago. This lead to CoreCLR being open sourced and Visual Studio Code being built.
The rumor sounds bogus. MS has been collaborating with Xamarin (and it's previous incarnation) for almost a decade.
Well, there's the public known facts and then there's a "rumor". I don't know why we're even discussing something as unsubstantiated as the latter.
Besides, even if the price was public, one could read anything it wants it that. "Oh the number is low because MS undermined them".
From what I've seen, the numbers for those companies like Xamarin are always much much lower that BS inflated unicorns with no actual business models...
And there's another thing: for what Xamarin offers (which is in the mobile space, with their support for iOS/Android APIs etc), the open source CLR and the VS Code, the basis for the rumor, don't even figure at all. Nobody that used Xamarin will gonna turn to those products, because they simply don't do the same thing at all.
> This lead to CoreCLR being open sourced and Visual Studio Code being built.
What is it you think those to products are? They aren't trying to reproduce anything Xamarin does.
CoreCLR is part of Microsoft's "cloudy" strategy, they want to be on Linux micro-instances, and on Windows Server Nano. Visual Studio Code is just the absolutely minimum Microsoft has to do to make CoreCLR seem "real" on other platforms (a 101 UI).
Honestly the whole .Net open sourcing/porting thing is a lot older than this cross-platform interest and while the two are aligned right now I highly doubt that's what kicked it off.
Rumor is just south of $300 Million. A nice chunk of change...but Xamarin had the gas and customers to head much higher valuations. Congrats to all involved.
VS Code was created to do something with the Monaco editor developed in typescript for their cloud offering. Same for CoreCLR, the slow and memory hungry runtime of Xamarin wasn't a treat to MS, .Net was approaching irrelevancy without a Linux presence in cloud offerings.
Open sourcing the compiler, CoreCLR, and JIT made Xamarin's life easier, not harder.
Acquiring Xamarin is just acknowledging that Windows Phone is DOA and their best shot at monetizing the mobile world is providing backend hosting/services and developer tools. That's not a secret - that's their publicly announced strategy.
I'd expect all the Xamarin tools to be built-in to VS going forward. One VS/MSDN subscription gets you everything and the tools will make it trivially easy to host on Azure.
That doesn't sound like the relationship Miguel and Nat have cultivated with .net or MS, and they could have continued on saying "No." Xamarin didn't NEED MS beyond what it already provides openly, everywhere (.net market support both technically + marketing)
I'd almost be surprised if there were previous formal offers as I'm pretty sure the discussions between Miguel and various MS folks, especially Scott Gu, were frank, open, and mostly trusting. You don't throw out formal offers if you have Xamarin openly talking through why they don't feel the time is right.
My take is Miguel and Nat have always been "do right by the technology first." They danced the line with mono and old MS. They then made a compelling step towards where MS would head a few years prior to MS being able to start showing progress in that direction.
> This lead to CoreCLR being open sourced and Visual Studio Code being built. I'd like to know if by undermining parts of Xamarins business they were able to get them at substantial discount
As a CoreCLR contributor, my impression was always that the mono-team was extremely happy about .NET official going open-source and how that made it possible to align the two code-bases in a much better fashion.
I don't think I've ever seen CoreCLR portrayed as an effort to "undermine" Xamarin or mono. Rather I'd take it as an imitation, the ultimate form of complement.
404 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 316 ms ] threadHopefully they'll keep Monodevelop under development, if they don't bring VS to Linux.
[1]https://xamarin.com/student
https://xamarin.com/starter
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.
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.
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.
Mono only supports a subset of the whole stack.
No sane .NET developer would use Mono on Windows, its purpose is .NET portability to other OSes.
WHY ARE WE ARGUING?
explodes
Poor guy. His name autocorrects to one of the best-known names in computing.
Last I checked, that was just a forked and rebranded Mono Develop with Xamarin's main product line (iOS and Android support for .NET) bundled in.
Extend with proprietary functionality
Extinguish the competition
The competition for .Net isn't Xamarin. It's the Java platform.
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.
Can't see why. It's obvious Microsoft perfected executive outplacement as an offensive weapon.
Although technically MeeGo had no shipping hardware at the time. The N900 ran Maemo, the first (and sadly only) MeeGo hardware to ship to the public was the N9 which didn't ship until months after the "burning platform" announcement
MS licensed their patents, but the current profitable Nokia kept them and has a unit dedicated to research and IP.
One can argue that the licensing was cheap, but cross-licensing agreements between companies is very common.
Disclaimer: I have been one of the ones pushing the last 5 years to make that statement true. ;)
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...
It seems like they are giving with one hand (open source to developers) and taking with the other (data from their unsuspecting users).
Well, you know, you can't walk into the same Windows twice. (Unless you ignore all updates.)
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
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) and is invariably tedious.
"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.
Is it even possible for you guys to kill the undead SCO monster now? At any rate, it's still working away.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Also, both the JavaScript language and runtime were pretty hard to build reliable, performant apps in back when Silverlight was introduced. The JavaScript language and runtimes have matured considerably since then.
If it had been my say, I'd have kept it for a little longer than they did, but by now I'd say it's no longer necessary.
There were always two camps in the Silverlight world, both inside and outside of Microsoft: those that saw it as a way to make browser-based applications more awesome, and those that saw Silverlight as a way to get away from that yucky HTML/CSS/JS dev. I was always firmly in the first camp, and from that side of things I wouldn't take back a minute I spent on Silverlight dev - I got a jump on video, vector graphics, browser-based apps, etc., long before it was practical to do that in the browser. When those technologies hit mainstream browsers, great!
Note: Microsoft employee but definitely only speaking for myself here.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11167964
I'm sure there are Officially no privacy implications here.
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.
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.
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.
You either die a developer or live long enough to see yourself become the manager?
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-ad6eb5b...
MonoDevelop is a clone of Visual Studio written in C# which isn't even remotely compatible with the mis-named Visual Studio Code.
If they want to port MonoDevelop to Visual Studio Code, they would have to re-write all the features from scratch.
At this point they might as well re-write Visual Studio to node.js and not waste time on porting MonoDevelop.
I hope it doesn't happen. I certainly don't want to develop on an IDE written on top of a God-awful language with a ridiculously slow run-time.
Maybe when we finally have a universal bytecode for the web and ECMAScript 6 then developing on it will be less painful. Let us hope.
Already shipping with it. See:
1. https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/3029
2. https://github.com/OmniSharp/omnisharp-vscode
They might have great intentions with MonoDevelop when it first launched, but it has been lagging behind other IDEs forever. With things like IntelliJ Rider, this position is not going to improve.
From my perspective Microsoft has done more with Visual Studio Code since its release 10 months ago than MonoDevelop has done in a decade. I'd argue it's easier to extend VSC to use it for C# development (which it already supports [1]) than to get MonoDevelop on par with modern IDEs.
And despite being JS/TS, the IDE is very very fast.
[1] https://code.visualstudio.com/Docs/languages/csharp
Wouldn't it be cool if they gave this same treatment to ReactOS down the road? I think Microsoft has woken up to the power of open source technologies.
That said, the core and infrastructure and all the stuff that makes it run is still a radioactive COM wasteland, and from experience trying to write an extension once, you can tell..
(Some sarcasm intended)
The other devs are still using a better terminal editor.
As a personal anecdote, I did give VSC a try when I had to write some TypeScript. Installed a couple of plugins for Neovim and I was both at home (which means, more productive) and still had the same functionality I used in VSC.
Mobile OK but Linux? Currently on the HN frontpage theres an article about how Skype for Linux hasn't been updated for years and "is unable to join calls": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11165568
Microsoft is so far from having the capability of doing any of those things. Any company that has a monopoly starts acting evil, but Microsoft is no longer close to having monopoly.
They don't want end users to run Linux desktop.
So devtools/languages/cloud divisions inside Microsoft like Linux.
Those in ms who deal with end user applications (home users in this case, as ms push Lync to business) probably see little point in investing in development in Skype for Linux.
I think it can become the best alternative to the javascript world, which already can target all these, but needs all kinds of native support and is much less solid as a language.
Ugh no. Professionally, I would have a lot to gain from that as a developer but in general that would be an awful turn of events. Long term it would be a net negative for the world and we all should know better by now.
You can see it right here in this thread: as another commenter said, not that long ago this news would've prompted universal predictions of doom, whereas now people seem thrilled. Timing is everything.
Xamarin.forms has nothing to do with winforms.
It's a cross platform mobile UI library.
Congrats!
Back when MS broadcasted OSX/nix compatibility for Visual Studio I felt it necessary to comment that .NET development has been supported in OSX/nix for over a decade.
In short, Miguel De Icaza should be awarded a medal from MS for his heroic effort in developing the Mono platform and tooling; in spite of the constant threat of legal action from Microsoft for 'patent infringement' of their supposedly 'open' (ie ECMA) standard languages and VM.
Hopefully, he finally receives public recognition and reward for all his hard work.
That doesn't mean Microsoft would never sue them or their users. If a Fortune 500 company using Mono receives a letter from Microsoft, they'll act exactly the same as any Android manufacturer that received similar letters.
Which is why I'm inclined to think of it as FUD-spreading. It's not about a balanced assessment of the strategic risks involved in using a particular open source product so much as it's about how one company in particular has been mythologized into something approaching a Lovecraftian horror in the minds of many members of a particular subculture.
Luckily, we will be joining a new Microsoft (pending regulatory approval), one lead by Satya which has a different vision for the company. We are excited about what this means for Xamarin's products, for our customers, for our users, for our employees, but most of all, we are excited about what we can achieve inside Microsoft for all of Microsoft's customers, and the rapidly growing open source community around .NET.
Cheers! Miguel
Hopefully, the regulatory approval stuff works out without issue.
Microsoft needs better representation in OSS and I can't think of anybody better equipped to assist them in that direction.
...
>>> egularly used Mac OS X instead of Linux for desktop computing
Haven't heard of him before, seems like he's choosing being pragmatic over being philosophically right. I like this :)
The rumor was Miguel told MS to "F*#K Off" when MS presented him with an offer many years ago. This lead to CoreCLR being open sourced and Visual Studio Code being built.
I'd like to know if by undermining parts of Xamarins business they were able to get them at substantial discount - especially with the tech industry downturn. Or if failure in the Windows Phone market has made MS desperate and forced their hand. Given it's undisclosed I'm guessing it's the former. I'd like to know if telling MS to "F#&K Off" was a good strategy :)
The rumor sounds bogus. MS has been collaborating with Xamarin (and it's previous incarnation) for almost a decade.
Besides, even if the price was public, one could read anything it wants it that. "Oh the number is low because MS undermined them".
From what I've seen, the numbers for those companies like Xamarin are always much much lower that BS inflated unicorns with no actual business models...
And there's another thing: for what Xamarin offers (which is in the mobile space, with their support for iOS/Android APIs etc), the open source CLR and the VS Code, the basis for the rumor, don't even figure at all. Nobody that used Xamarin will gonna turn to those products, because they simply don't do the same thing at all.
What is it you think those to products are? They aren't trying to reproduce anything Xamarin does.
CoreCLR is part of Microsoft's "cloudy" strategy, they want to be on Linux micro-instances, and on Windows Server Nano. Visual Studio Code is just the absolutely minimum Microsoft has to do to make CoreCLR seem "real" on other platforms (a 101 UI).
Honestly the whole .Net open sourcing/porting thing is a lot older than this cross-platform interest and while the two are aligned right now I highly doubt that's what kicked it off.
Acquiring Xamarin is just acknowledging that Windows Phone is DOA and their best shot at monetizing the mobile world is providing backend hosting/services and developer tools. That's not a secret - that's their publicly announced strategy.
I'd expect all the Xamarin tools to be built-in to VS going forward. One VS/MSDN subscription gets you everything and the tools will make it trivially easy to host on Azure.
I'd almost be surprised if there were previous formal offers as I'm pretty sure the discussions between Miguel and various MS folks, especially Scott Gu, were frank, open, and mostly trusting. You don't throw out formal offers if you have Xamarin openly talking through why they don't feel the time is right.
My take is Miguel and Nat have always been "do right by the technology first." They danced the line with mono and old MS. They then made a compelling step towards where MS would head a few years prior to MS being able to start showing progress in that direction.
As a CoreCLR contributor, my impression was always that the mono-team was extremely happy about .NET official going open-source and how that made it possible to align the two code-bases in a much better fashion.
I don't think I've ever seen CoreCLR portrayed as an effort to "undermine" Xamarin or mono. Rather I'd take it as an imitation, the ultimate form of complement.
Where did you get/form that picture?