

Announcing Xamarin 2.0 - petercooper
http://blog.xamarin.com/announcing-xamarin-2.0/

======
andyjohnson0
I have mixed feeling about this. I have a current Mono for Android Profession
subscription and use the Visual Studio integration a lot. My subscription is
due for renewal next month and if I want to continue to use VS with Xamarin
2.0 then I have to renew at the Business edition level. I paid for my sub out
of my own pocket because I liked the technology so much, but $399 for the pro
version last year was a stretch and I just can't justify $1k to renew. Xamarin
Studio might be superb, but I've been using VS since 1995 and I really don't
need to learn another new IDE right now.

Any comments from Miguel or anyone from Xamarin?

That said, the Indie edition is something that a lot or people were asking for
and the price is attractive. The components look good too. I think its going
to be a big success.

Edit: See Nat Friedman's response below [1]. Existing Pro subscribers are
automatically upgraded to Business and can renew at their existing renewal
price. This is described in the FAQ [2] which I didn't read far enough down.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5250922>

[2] <http://xamarin.com/xamarin-2.0-faq>

~~~
natfriedman
As an existing Professional customer you are automatically upgraded to
Business edition and can renew at you existing renewal price (which is $249
for you).

Hope that helps :-)

~~~
keithwarren
How long will renewals be this cheap, just the first time around?

~~~
natfriedman
We don't have an end date.

------
the_mitsuhiko
Periodic reminder to the Linux and free software community of the damage they
made with their ideology wars against the Mono environment. Mono is now the
most popular game and one of the most popular app development environments.
:-)

Kudos to Miguel and the rest of the Xamarin team, the update looks amazing.

~~~
rbanffy
> Periodic reminder to the Linux and free software community of the damage
> they made with their ideology wars against the Mono environment

What damage, exactly? I don't think Linux adoption is in any way harmed by the
removal of all Mono packages from the default installs of several distros.

> Mono is now the most popular game and one of the most popular app
> development environments

I find that a bit hard to believe unless you are talking about cross-platform
mobile game development.

~~~
gebe
I guess he means Unity which uses Mono. But there are others as well like
MonoGame which is the de facto XNA successor (and its natural evolution) and
Playstation Mobile that uses Mono.

edit: Would be quite awesome if they somehow incorporated the Mono runtime on
the new Playstation as well for indie development. Here's for wishful
thinking!

~~~
joseph_cooney
I think a lot of NaCl games are also written in MONO.

------
keithwarren
I have been working with the beta and am extremely pleased. I think people
will get very excited over the VS integration for iOS but I think the
component store is going to be one of the big winners here.

The MonoDevelop rewrite (Xamarin Studio) also has a clean, fresh and fast feel
to it. I cannot say that X is empirically faster or better but the experience
does feel better overall.

I think they are heading in the right direction here and the holy grail for
breaking strongly into the enterprise may be the ability to build for iOS
without the need for a Mac. It is not there yet but you can see the direction
they are going and how that will likely come to pass at some point.

~~~
tracker1
You will generally speaking always need a Mac for building.. but I could see a
time where they have a Mac build farm and it is just part of the service
offered.

------
boothead
Any news on building apps with F#? These two articles look like a great start,
but it would be nice if there was a more official/streamlined way to do it.

<http://7sharpnine.com/posts/monotouch-and-fsharp-part-i/>
<http://7sharpnine.com//posts/monotouch-and-fsharp-part-ii/>

I'm still waiting for part 3 if Dave is reading :-)

~~~
migueldeicaza
We are actively working on F# support for our products.

We have built on the great work that the F# community has done and will be
shipping it in future versions of the product.

We are looking at a beat of our F# support for March.

~~~
boothead
Great news! I'd better stop reading all those haskell books and start brushing
up on F# 3.0 then I guess :-)

~~~
setuporg
Haskell books will certainly not hurt. You won't need monads right away and
you won't feel lacking certain Haskell powers if you don't read RWH right
away, but in the long run, it will make F# more enjoyable. Of course OCaml
books, ML books, and Clojure books will always help too, as will Scala ones.

------
wsc981
Seems awesome. I wonder how they made it possible to have an iOS simulator in
their Visual Studio plug-in. Apparently it will be possible to develop native
iOS / Android apps written in C# from Visual Studio and I'm guessing from
Windows.

I have much respect for Miguel and the other guys at Xamarin. They work on
some great stuff, I think C# has a great future for mobile development because
of all the work these guys have done.

~~~
_stephan
From
[http://docs.xamarin.com/guides/ios/getting_started/installat...](http://docs.xamarin.com/guides/ios/getting_started/installation/windows#24-limitations)

"No iOS simulator on Windows. The iOS Simulator runs on Mac OS X, so it’s
necessary to switch to the Mac’s screen when testing on the simulator."

~~~
AlexeyBrin
_Our new Business edition, at $999, now includes iOS support for Visual Studio
developers._

I guess you will be able to use a device from Windows, or something like that.
Otherwise it won't make sense to provide iOS support for VS.

Correction - you will need a Mac for the final build of the product. VS will
connect through network to this Mac ... Not sure if it makes more sense to
just use VS as a glorified C# editor. I suppose if you are a hard core VS user
it will be easier to do your development from VS.

~~~
mynameismiek
Using VS would be a huge plus. You don't have to buy a bunch of pricey macs,
just 1. You don't have to retrain C# coders to use a Mac. You can use
ReSharper! You can open two code windows side by side, something monodevelop
cannot do (not sure about Xamarin Studio as I am still waiting on the
download). VS integration with Team Foundation is much better than git-tf, so
if your company is already using Team Foundation you can tack on iOS
development/ports with out much trouble. There are a lot of reasons it makes
sense.

------
shadowmint
Great work, this is really cool. A couple of thoughts, idly:

\- 'Xamarin Studio' just a new coat of paint on monodevelop, but it has some
nice things in this version; new ui, the autocomplete especially is _vastly_
improved.

\- Seems a bit laggy on my mac mini for some reason, which is a bit
disappointing, but works fine on my imac. Both mountain lion, so who knows?

\- _Still_ no PCL's for macs. :( _sigh_ (yes, you still need to have a
separate project for each platform, which includes all the same files).

~~~
bunderbunder
Are they contributing changes back to MonoDevelop?

~~~
jstedfast
Yes. <https://github.com/mono/monodevelop/commits/master>

------
songgao
I'm curious how it integrates Mono runtime into a "native ARM executable". The
whole runtime must be really big. When building the App, does it only
integrates the parts required to support the App, or does it integrate all?

The other question is that, when running on iOS, is it the .NET IL running on
top of the runtime, or C# code is compiled into native binary code that can be
directly executed on CPU? I'm trying to figure out if there's something like a
micro VM running.

~~~
shadowmint
Dunno, but the android ones are pretty big. A simple 'hello world' view:

    
    
        ls -sl ~/Desktop/HelloWorld.apk
        10144 -rw-r--r--  1 doug  core  5191787 20 Feb 23:46 /Users/doug/Desktop/HelloWorld.apk

~~~
songgao
Most Apps are not as simple as a "hello world" view. My guess is that, the
getting-started pack is large but when you add more things into it, it doesn't
increase that much.

------
untog
As an indie developer who recently bought the full priced package so that he
could start testing on real devices: argh. As a developer that knows C# and
wants to make iOS apps: awesome.

I haven't had a chance to download it and try it out yet, but Xamarin Studio
looks amazing. I've long thought that MonoDevelop has a very solid core but
little polish- it looks like Studio adds that polish.

~~~
kerbs
From the FAQs, if this helps.

"Customers that purchased within the past 90 days may request a partial refund
for the price difference between their purchase price and Indie. If you choose
to make this downgrade, you will lose access to many great Xamarin Business
features you already enjoy, including Visual Studio and email-based support."

~~~
itsnotvalid
That pricing is much cheaper than a full $999 price tag and is entitled to
$249 upgrades for future, so it seems to be a bargain.

~~~
yareally
I just bought a license a few months ago. I'd rather keep the business license
and the old renewal cost as well over a refund. It would be silly not to with
the additional features if one wishes to keep using C# for long term cross-
platform development.

------
rayiner
This looks amazing. I think in many ways Xamarin has out-done Microsoft here.
I'm not sure if Xamarin Studio is more featureful than Visual Studio (VS went
over the "overly complex" hill for me after 6.x), but it looks a lot cleaner
and easier to get into.

Anyone know if debugging C/C++ code on Mac is still unsupported as it is in
MonoDevelop 3.0?

~~~
tracker1
I'm surprised you have that opinion on VS.. the addition of easy add-on
installs and nuget packages in 2010-2012 are pretty nice. I found the VS6 UI's
decent, but since I do most of my work in web based apps, it never cut it
there. These days about half my time is in VS/C# and the other half in
WebStorm/NodeJS. I also think web apps have a lot of milage and in some cases
more to offer depending on what you are wanting to accomplish. <br/><br/> I am
glad that Xamarin has a viable business model, and wish them all the success
in the world.

------
sgt
This is great and looks very interesting. First question - what happened to
the Windows Phone 8 support? Won't we be able to develop Windows Phone
applications using Xamarin?

It says on <http://xamarin.com/Windows> that Xamarin does support all three
platforms, but I don't see anything about the Xamarin studio there.

~~~
migueldeicaza
While we make our cross platform libraries like Xamarin.Mobile run on all
platforms, including Windows, we do not actually provide an IDE for Windows
Phone apps.

Microsoft already provides a complete and capable product for that space.

~~~
michielvoo
> Microsoft already provides a complete and capable product for that space.

Not on OS X.

~~~
jstedfast
You raise an interesting point...

------
edwinnathaniel
What does it mean with "you cannot P/Invoke 3rd-party library"? Does this mean
that Xamarin Free edition is limited to the scope of iOS basic SDK and not
3rd-party Obj-C library out there?

Or does this include some of the iOS extended library (if any?) from Apple?

Sorry if this is a dumb question, I'm not quite familiar with iOS ecosystems.

~~~
jstedfast
It just means that the Starter Edition (aka the free version) does not allow
P/Invoking into C libraries.

You can still use all of Apple's APIs and bindings for third-party Objective-C
libraries.

------
AlexeyBrin
You can actually use the Starter Edition to publish a small application. Wow!
This will increase the adoption of Xamarin ...

------
Herbert2
I've mostly worked on the server side of things for the last few years but
last year I decided to dip into mobile. I felt disappointed after trying
MonoDevelop as I found a lot of the things I had really appreciated in server
development missing or inadequate. Things like a proper package manager and
easy integration with CI servers. I just got NuGet to work last month, after
trying it infrequently over a couple of months. xbuild, I never got to work
properly, sure I was able to run unit tests inside MonoDevelop but my
expectations were a bit higher.

Meanwhile, over in Javaville, I can do just about anything Android related my
heart desires with Maven and even CocoaPods in its infancy was a better
experience than NuGet. Just my 2 cents.

------
benoits
Ars review here: [http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2013/02/xamari...](http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2013/02/xamarin-2-0-reviewed-ios-development-finally-comes-to-
visual-studio/2/)

------
lucian1900
This looks very nice, in particular the free version. I would never consider
trying a runtime that can expire, even for experimenting.

They still don't have a Linux version though, which is disappointing, since I
can't try it.

~~~
naglfar
True, but judging from Miguel's stance on the use of Linux for a desktop OS, I
doubt we'll be seeing a Linux port of it.

------
chrisdevereux
While C# looks like a great language, and I'm looking forward to playing with
this, does Xamarin really allow you to share that much code between platforms?

In my experience, 75% of my mobile app code tends to be either working with
platform-specific APIs or just quite trivial. Is the potential for code reuse
high enough to justify the extra layer of stuff to understand (and potentially
break)?

Edit: I can see how being able to use C# is a plus for some people, I guess
I'm just slightly skeptical of the cross-platform selling point.

~~~
gebe
Here are two developers that have shared some stats on code reuse:

iCircuit [http://praeclarum.org/post/42378027611/icircuit-code-
reuse-p...](http://praeclarum.org/post/42378027611/icircuit-code-reuse-part-
cinq)

TouchDraw <http://lipsky.me/blog/2012/9/11/touchdraw-code-reuse-updated>

~~~
chrisdevereux
Ahh, hard stats vs. gut instinct. That's interesting, thanks. I'd still be
concerned that dealing with the differences between native APIs may take up an
amount of time not reflected by a LOC count, but I'm more tempted to give it a
try...

------
PabloOsinaga
I am a bit ambivalent - on one side, as I think about new product ideas that
will naturally be multiplaform, something like this is very appealing in
theory, but my experience tells me that the lowest-common-denominator approach
has almost always failed.

I wonder how folks are thinking about that problem - i.e., if you are starting
a new app from scratch - even if you are doing iOS only initially - do you go
objective-c or xamarin/c# ?

it's quite hard to make an educated decision.

any thoughts?

~~~
migueldeicaza
We do not actually provide a lowest-common-denominator.

It is simpler to think of Xamarin as providing you with:

* C# language on iOS, Android, Mac * 1:1 API bindings to whatever is native on a given platform. On iOS, the CocoaTouch APIs, on Android, the Android APIs, on Mac the Cocoa/CoreFoundation-based APIs.

From this basic setup, you can already see that you wont get code that will
run on all platforms. You will need to split your code into cross-platform
code (database access, web services, xml, json parsing, offline caches,
authentication) and things that are UI-specific (Android activities, Android
widgets, iOS View Controllers, and so on).

~~~
zura
>We do not actually provide a lowest-common-denominator.

This actually is the reason I keep away from Xamarin, and I guess I'm not
alone...

I think that there is a room for having a cross-platform lowest-common-
denominator, including UI, File system, Networking, etc... with ability to
dive into platform specific details when needed.

~~~
coldtea
Nothing stops you from treating Xamarin as one.

But it also supports the full experience for each platform.

~~~
zura
You can't treat Xamarin as one... e.g. you can't write a simple calculator UI
in a cross-platform way - You would have to code the UI part separately for
iOS and Android.

At least, that's my understanding and OP (Miguel) confirms it. And I guess
your mileage won't vary in this aspect ;)

Although, Xamarin.Mobile is a step in the right direction, as commented here.

~~~
coldtea
> _You can't treat Xamarin as one... e.g. you can't write a simple calculator
> UI in a cross-platform way - You would have to code the UI part separately
> for iOS and Android._

Yes, but they do offer a "base" abstraction layer besides the C# libraries,
that includes stuff like GPS access, accelerometers, etc.

As for the UI part, one could use a Webkit View as the view, and link the
various heavy actions to C# code. For something like a common denominator UI,
for a simple calculator or some form based stuff, it would be perfectly fine.

------
ceronman
Does this mean that MonoDevelop is now officially dead?

~~~
jstedfast
No, it's still very much alive and kicking:
<https://github.com/mono/monodevelop/commits/master>

------
BSousa
This is great work.

Working with monodevelop was a pain in MacOS.

Downloading it now, but from the sales page alone they got me.

Good work!

------
j_s
This is a pretty cool deal; nice to see an open-source powered company that
has found a self-supporting niche.

It will be interesting to see how they strike a balance between making money
and keeping things (like Mono.Mac, MonoDevelop, etc.) open... and if they are
able to build a community of outside contributors around the open-source parts
of their solution(s).

~~~
AlexanderDhoore
I was wondering about this. Are they planning to keep some part open source? I
feel like they ditched that entire idea...

~~~
jstedfast
MonoDevelop, MonoMac, and Mono itself are still all open source.

<http://github.com/mono/monodevelop>

<http://github.com/mono/monomac>

<http://github.com/mono/maccore>

<http://github.com/mono/mono>

Xamarin also has a number of open source modules on github:
<https://github.com/xamarin>

~~~
j_s
It would be nice to see a blog post or two on the mile-high long-term etc.
goals Xamarin has for the open source aspects of their tech... or perhaps a
pointer to any existing summary. As you've pointed out, Xamarin is rather
quietly contributing a lot; it would be great to have a place to point the
non-developers to that explained this as well.

~~~
migueldeicaza
Do you mind emailing me a list of questions, to make sure I address all of
them?

My blogging has gone down, due to twitter mostly, but this is a good chance to
talk about our open source work.

Cheers! Miguel

~~~
AlexanderDhoore
That would be really great. Me being skeptical pays off after all. This is why
HN is so great.

I look forward to your blog post.

------
fingerprinter
I'm been pretty excited about Xamarin for quite some time, but today I'm not
as excited.

The new Studio looks great, but there isn't a Linux version. This makes me
very, very sad.

The one thing that could make me very happy, however, is if they target the
Ubuntu mobile/touch SDK in the future. Wonder if this is on the horizon?

~~~
jstedfast
If the Ubuntu mobile/touch devices become popular, I have no doubt that we'll
come out with a product for writing Ubuntu mobile apps as well.

We're always looking into supporting other mobile platforms.

We've just pushed all of our MonoDevelop source code to public github and I'm
sure that the Ubuntu packagers will be packaging it for Ubuntu very soon.

------
felideon
Bummer, Mac OS 10.7.x required.

(Edit: I've been reluctant to upgrade from Snow Leopard, but maybe I should
reevaluate.)

~~~
petercooper
I held out for a really long time on 10.6 but upgraded a few months ago after
buying a new machine and it was a lot less painful than I'd imagined - worth a
go, though, as always with OS X, a fresh install may ultimately be less
painful than upgrading, even if it's time consuming.

~~~
felideon
Actually, my old Intel iMac at home can't even run Lion!

The main reason I always wait to upgrade is for kinks to be worked out in OS X
ports of mainly-GNU/Linux software.

------
henderson101
It seems that you will now charge for Mac only development via XamerinStudio?
Is that correct? At least, when I went to clarify the multi-buy discount for
Indy, I saw to my utter horror that Xamarin.Mac is an included option at $299.
So, what does that mean to Mac only Developers? Are we now forever restricted
to a 32kb app with no third party P/Invokes too? I'm certainly not ever in
1,000,000 years ever giving you a penny for the Mac target. I think this is an
extremely worrying move on Xamerin's part and if we really do have to buy a
subscription to get continued support, I really do feel betrayed. I mean, come
on, Apple have charged $5 for XCode for a short period for as long as it has
existed. And I can open it now and create an app for free. I really don't
understand this move. I'm hoping I've get the wrong idea and Miguel (et al)
will correct me.

------
kayoone
When starting out with mobile apps i always wonder if it pays off to invest
heavily in something like this (i love C#) or put my money on web-tech based
apps especially if looking at it mid/long term. I know web-tech isnt there
yet, but its not far off. What do you think ?

------
oohmeplums
Hah, I knew I should've pulled the trigger on buying MonoTouch last week!

Oh well, at least I can do some testing on a real device without buying
anything for the moment.

From looking at the comparison chart on <https://store.xamarin.com/> , the
LLVM optimising compiler only seems to be available for Business or above.
What does this mean in practice?

------
nnq
If I have a team (a "team" of me +2, don't think too big) of coders proficient
in both C# and C++, what advantages would using Xamarin bring over having the
common/cross-platform code in c++ (objective c++, ok...) and using the
platform specific languages and tools for the UI and whatever else ends up
being platform specific? (besides C# being a much nicer language, of course)

~~~
dalacv
There are tons of sdks and libraries that you can use with C# / .net. To name
just a small few that I have used: Stripe's .net sdk, parse.com's sdk,
amazon's sdk for .net... the list goes on and on. Pull their dlls in and just
use them. It makes a cinch of hooking into other services.

------
chaostheory
Looks interesting but the prices are about equivalent to MSDN subscriptions.
Does this make financial sense for most C# developers?

------
agildehaus
The activation stage of the download isn't working for me. Servers appear to
be hosed.

------
evo_9
So does this version support building native OS-X apps, aka uses the cocoa UI
elements instead of gtk# or something similar? I played with this a while back
and I couldn't get the UI to look native at all, it was quite disappointing.

------
frytaz
Getting 500 error on download page, is there any mirror for dmg file ? :)

~~~
brajkovic
Hi,

Our servers buckled a little bit under the load. We load-tested, but missed a
piece of infrastructure in the chaos. We've since beefed up that last piece of
infrastructure, and you should be all set now to use the download form at
<http://xamarin.com/download>. If you're still having trouble, contact our
support at support@xamarin.com. Cheers!

------
buster
It's a shame that Linux support at Xamarin is obviously dropped in many
places, so no Mono development for me. :(

------
songgao
The downloading seems to be halted on my Mac. I'm using a case-sensitive
partition. Does this matter?

------
gamesurgeon
Is anyone else encountering errors with the installation? I'm on a Mac 10.8.2

------
shubham003
How to add database addin to xamarin studio to get database access ?

~~~
wareagle920
You may want to check out something like SQLite-Net:
<https://github.com/praeclarum/sqlite-net>

Really easy to setup and get up and running!

