I tinkered around with Xamarin, and a very basic app (using some 3rd party libraries) or even using the tutorial/sample apps was immediately outside of their free tier.<p>Now I would like to understand the logic behind the 30 day free trial. If you are preventing app distribution (binaries are only valid for 24hrs when compiled in the trial version) why restrict it to 30 days? Why not allow people to tinker around as much as they want? I see no negatives to having an unlimited trial, and then simply charge to remove the '24hr binary' restriction.<p>As it is, the little free time I had over those 30 days to play with Xamarin equated to around 5 hours, most of which was going through the tutorials and sample apps (which you cant use in the free mode). I certainly haven't experienced enough to commit to a purchase, and now I likely never will.<p>I spoke with one of your colleagues about this. He offered me 20% discount on the business tier if I purchased iOS and Android (~$1600 'value') within 4 days... All i wanted to do was evaluate the damn thing...<p>I think what you are doing is great, but please try and apply some common sense to your evaluations.
I have been working with Xamarin stuff for a couple years now, released about 7 apps with them and honestly cannot imagine another approach. I mainly work with smaller startups in specific line of business scenarios and it has become a necessity to not only have viable mobile offerings, but they have to have parity across platforms and support both phone and tablets. When I go into a sales meeting and pitch the idea that I can build for Android and iOS using the same language and sharing much of that code - I usually crush my competitors on price - which saves the customer money and makes more money for me (yipeee!)<p>The Forms work in Xamarin 3 seems lined up to make that pitch even easier and will likely help Xamarin grow into the enterprise even faster as ease of management in the code base is going to be a major driver in decisions for IT shops that now have to support a much more diverse platform set than they did in the days when a website was good enough.
Thanks for all the kind words, everyone! This release was the result of a lot of hard work; especially the new visual designer for iOS, which took two years to build.<p>You can read more about our platform here:<p><a href="http://xamarin.com/platform" rel="nofollow">http://xamarin.com/platform</a>
<a href="http://xamarin.com/studio" rel="nofollow">http://xamarin.com/studio</a>
<a href="http://xamarin.com/visual-studio" rel="nofollow">http://xamarin.com/visual-studio</a><p>And our new Xamarin.Forms library is explained here:
<a href="http://xamarin.com/forms" rel="nofollow">http://xamarin.com/forms</a>
Kind of amazing that Xamarin now seems to have better dev tools for iOS than Apple do.<p>I was badly burnt by buying a Xamarian dev license a couple of years ago for $499 then not using it (my own fault entirely) so I've been hesitant to jump back in to Xamarin-world, but it's really only a matter of time. I'm very impressed.
Now all they have to do is make it free. Seriously though, as a student I can't shell out $299 for a license and even at the $99/year student rate (with proof of relevant course work), I can't see myself paying $99/year to write/maintain apps I've built. Especially considering the $99/year Apple app store fee.<p>Please, Xamarin, show us young C# devs some love!<p>update: not really sure why the down votes. I'm big fan of Xamarin and C# in general. All I was doing was pointing out that there's no way I can afford/am willing to buy their software and that I think I speak for the majority of student developers.
Man, as much as I'd love to use Xamarin w/ VS, 3 platforms for a single developer (myself) is $3000. It looks like a great product but wow, I can't swing that solo while bootstrapping. Have you considered a free-until-release approach? Don't get me wrong, you guys need to make money, I'm just wondering if there is a more optimal / appealing approach for those that are between Indie and Business.
Awesome work! I wonder how responsive the UIs created are? The workflow looks a lot like Windows Forms (dropping elements in the editor and resize to match), and there it wasn't exactly easy to produce interfaces that could scale or even adapt.<p>So, in short: is this more Forms or WPF?<p>(I've looked at the subpage for Forms now, and the widgets presented there tend to lean heavily towards WPF.. so yay!)
Beautiful work. Congrats to Miguel, Nat and everyone on the team.<p>Funny that IB stinks so much they had to basically rewrite it.<p>Also, I like the (minor) redesign. Looks more solid now.
Xamarin.Forms looks <i>very</i> compelling. In a former life I was a .NET person, and so I've always kept my eye on Xamarin, but the only real mobile stuff I've done has been native cocoa touch dev on iOS.<p>Even though Xamarin.Forms might be a lowest-common-denominator type of thing, being able to build basically "universal" apps looks awesome.<p>The indie license really isn't very expensive, but I wish the starter version allowed bigger apps (but maybe stripped out publishing to app stores or something), so you could really thoroughly check it out without spending $300.
Xamarin is the cross-platform solution I would consider first for developing mobile apps, and I can't think of a second one that's close. If your team is mostly experienced in C# or if F# is your thing, I would really seriously consider it versus training for iOS and Android. It's an very hard problem, and Xamarin has successfully gone from "That's neat but weird" to what looks like a practical tool that isn't going to leave you stranded with an oddball code base.
It's a real shame that Xamarin has a such a prohibitive pricing structure.<p>My employer would love for me to use this on projects but they simply won't pay that much for a tool EACH YEAR.<p>Considering Visual Studio, if you actually pay for it and don't go to an event and get a free copy, is a one time cost that a company can semi-easily justify (we've been on VS2010 for over 4 years now, with 5 developers, that's a major expense if we have re-subscribe each year).<p>But with Xamarin, unlike Visual Studio, it's a 1 year subscription. I hate to say it but I agree with my employer, as much as I LOVE using Xamarin to build mobile/cross platform apps, the current pricing model is just crazy.<p>I'd say drop the subscription only option (maybe have that as one of the choices), and add some 'buy it, you own it forever' options, hopefully without raising the price (ideal world you'd drop the price, too).
I've never played with C# or Xamarin but this tool set is looking really good, specially the F# thing.<p>Anyone care to share their stories about F#? it appears to be a nice functional language.
Hey Guys,<p>I'm the co-founder of Avocarrot (<a href="http://www.avocarrot.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.avocarrot.com/</a>) and we were wondering for a while whether to build a dedicated plugin for Xamarin. How easily can you integrate an native Android or iOS SDK with your Xamarin apps? Would it make a big difference for you if a Xamarin plugin was available?
I appreciate that this is an initial announcement, but does anyone know what the situation is with upgrades for existing users?<p>Edit: Forgot to say that this new version looks really good - congrats to the Xamarin team! Not having to launch XCode is going to massively improve my quality of life.
Looks cool, but why translate to native UI elements at run-time as opposed to compile-time? Does it help with debugging?<p>Forgive my ignorance as I have not used Xamarin.
They aim on enteprise clients otherwise I cannot justify the pricing.<p>I cannot imagine spending 600 USD for both platforms just to build hobby project (and with missing Visual Studio support) and if I cannot build a hobby project, how can I propose it to my employer when I don't have any experience with it?<p>I would love to use Xamarin and would be willing to pay (I could justify 300 USD for all platforms (iOS, Android, Mac) with Visual Support for my hobby and indie projects. I hope Microsoft buys them or they will be more friendly to indie and hobby developers.
Detailed review of the v. 3.0 Enterprise Edition here:
<a href="http://www.drdobbs.com/240168321" rel="nofollow">http://www.drdobbs.com/240168321</a>
I know that the official comment regrading Linux support is that there are no plans to support it right now, I just want to say that there are people on Linux that are willing to pay for your product!<p>I'm developing cross platform mobile apps with HTML5 and I would jump at the chance of using Xamarin instead (I was a C# developer in another life).<p>I might just end up running it in a VM, but it would be great running Xamarin Studio on Linux.<p>Thanks :-)
Xamarin is great. I saw a colleague of mine developing apps with it and was simply amazed. I think it definitely deserves all they're asking for it. Just one thing though: Why do I have to pay 700$ difference per year just for VS support? Is it really that hard to integrate?
This is cool. I didn't know about Xamarin until now. I use Rdio a lot, and it's generally a very good, smooth-running app on my Nexus 4. Didn't realize it was built cross-platform like this!
Looking forward to giving this a try. I've built many mobile solutions in various languages / frameworks / platforms, but being new to C#, I'm eager to give this a go.
Looks great, love designer and Forms sounds epically wonderful (wonder if I can export my ios designs to forms for easier porting :-) )<p>First ten minutes experience:
I've got a little weirdness with the differences in generated code from x-code vs new designer (an outlet name went from upper case to lower for instance).<p>iOS designer is giving prominent error "Custom components are not being rendered because problems were detected".. Though everything seems fine and log doesn't particularly help.
Can I show two files open at once vertically split yet?<p>Follow Up: The answer is no. This is a pretty big productivity killer, and the ticket to implement this feature has been around forever. This is the last major gripe that is keeping me from using Xamarin Studio in lieu of VS2k12.
I don't understand how come that Indie license does not include Visual Studio support? I think the biggest issue with Xamarin for me is this: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/wmdaLL7.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/wmdaLL7.png</a>
I may be stupid, but I found Xamarin too bugged. And to use it well, i have to know C#, iOS and Android well. With Phonegap I need to know web dev well, phonegap, and much less of the underlying platform.