
Xamarin raises $16 million to help you go mobile - evo_9
http://blog.xamarin.com/xamarin-raises-16-million/
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skrebbel
I've recently become a Xamarin customer, and I haven't looked back yet. I'm
very impressed at how mature the platform, the docs and the tooling are given
that it's not from $BIGCORP.

Admittedly, there are a few bugs here and there,mostly in the build chain, but
they get fixed fast and support is excellent.

The only feature request I have is to allow us to give feedback on the docs.
Whille 95% are awesome, there's little mistakes here and there. I suspect
customers will gladly help trace those down.

~~~
pfisch
We used to use monotouch a lot, but as soon as we tried to use any third party
sdk it was a huge mess. All of the ones supplied by xamarin never quite
worked/were out of date and threw a bunch of weird errors.

Of course there is a way to write your own bindings, but the those threw a
bunch of undecipherable error messages as well and never really worked either.
The main problem was that there were way too many possible sources of the
errors to try and just diagnose the problem and the error messages themselves
were useless.

So basically xamarin was great as long as you didn't need to use a third party
sdk and there is 0 chance that down the road you might need to use a third
party sdk.

That was really the deal breaker for us, that we were severely limiting our
future capabilities on any app we made with monotouch.

Also it is often difficult to pull in third party c# libraries because
monotouch uses weird versions of all the main .net references. But this was
not the main problem.

In the end it is just much easier to bite the bullet and use obj C.

~~~
bratsche
I believe they have a new tool now to make bindings easier.

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kevingadd
Congrats to the Xamarin crew, this is well-deserved. They've been cranking out
some really useful products and doing a good job of building products that
layer nicely on top of the free Mono stack instead of gutting useful features
out of it to try and sell them to you.

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sker
These guys are the reason why I haven't jumped ship from .NET. These days I
call myself a Mono developer more often than a .NET developer.

~~~
zerr
While it is fine to pay for dev tools, IDE, I find unacceptable that the
language (a raw compiler) and libraries have a shareware ($400-$2000?) or any
other commercial model.

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hhandoko
What's specifically your objection?

I am happy to pay for the license for a guarantee of continuing (and timely)
updates.

Plus, looking at their target market, I don't think free, open source model
would be as effective.

Disclaimer: I am a Xamarin customer.

~~~
zerr
I think that the language (and its "batteries", i.e. std libs) should be
separated from the product, because products die. Xamarin model - while it can
be fine for a short stint, I don't think it is good for a long-term
relationship.

For me, Xamarin developer is kind of associated with Clarion developer,
PowerBuilder developer.

~~~
itsboring
You make a fair point and I normally share your view about compilers and
tools. I think the Xamarin situation is complex, though, because most of the
product is already open source. The C# compiler and x86 runtime, the standard
libs (System.*), and the IDE (monodevelop aka Xamarin Studio) are all open
source; and the platform bindings are a thin, almost 1:1 layer covering the
iOS and android APIs. What you're really paying for is the AOT mechanism,
packaging, and ARM runtime -- it's about all that's left they can sell. It's
also worth noting that a ton of their code goes back into mono and associated
projects.

I still think you have a good point, and I agree, but as for myself, I decided
to make an exception in this case. I don't think it's quite as bad as
PowerBuilder or Clarion at least.

~~~
yulaow
to be fair monodevelop and xamarin studio are not equal. The first is low
supported and full of bug but free ( i think that is voluntary), the second is
not free (at least not if you want to do something decent) and is the main
focus of xamarin. I would say they try to "trap" you in mono with monodevelop
to then oblige you to buy something more decent as xamarin studio.

~~~
migueldeicaza
Wrong.

Xamarin Studio and MonoDevelop are the exact same code base.

The only difference is that Xamarin Studio contains the iOS and Android
plugins, plus adds a Xamarin Branding (branding is completely pluggable in
MonoDevelop)

~~~
yulaow
Oh, my bad in this case. So why there is not a linux version of xamarin
studio? Or it is just because there is not a linux version of the plugins?

~~~
yareally
Mostly because they would have to provide their own Mono runtime as there's
too many variations in the vast number of Linux Distros out there. That
combined with demand is much lower than that of Windows and OSX for Mono.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15900963/is-it-
possible-t...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15900963/is-it-possible-to-
run-xamarin-mono-on-linux)

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Nican
I simply love mono, and find that C# is an amazing language, but I also find
that mono's project on github is a bit of a mess, and I really hope this
motivates them to clean it up, and provide better documentation on the
internals.

~~~
forgotAgain
Agreed. We actually gave mono a thumbs down as choice for a recent project
because of similar concerns. Xamarin support for the project seems to have
slowed as they have moved into mobile dev tools. As examples there has been no
official release of version 3. The last stable version is 2.10. Second there
is no indication they will add Web API support, arguably the most important
recent ASP.NET addition for those looking to do a REST interface in .Net.

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depoll
Huge congrats to the Xamarin folks. I'm a huge fan of their products.
Personally, I've found their tools for Android development to be less
cumbersome than Google's tools for the same. I was extremely impressed by
their Evolve conference as well. Great engineering and great, friendly,
responsive people. Kudos!

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khangtoh
The test cloud feature alone is impressive!

[http://xamarin.com/test-cloud](http://xamarin.com/test-cloud)

It's also not restricted to just using their solution, any native iOS /
Android / Whatever platform apps can use them.

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EdgarVerona
These guys slogged through an incredibly grueling task - porting the entire
.NET Framework and C# language - through some really hard times. I'm glad to
see that it's paying off for them!

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pjmlp
It is not the entire .NET framework.

[http://www.mono-project.com/Compatibility](http://www.mono-
project.com/Compatibility)

~~~
EdgarVerona
Well, yeah - but enough of that massive thing that it's a pretty impressive
test of patience.

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itsboring
Just wrapped up my first project at work with xamarin.ios and also used
monomac for some tools. It was awesome. The app used a bunch of opengl-es on
ios and everything went very smoothly. I'm always glad to see them pop up on
HN.

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swalsh
Hey xamarin guys, i know you visit this site. Can you call my boss and
convince him to use your product for me :D

we got a growing staff with an expertise in C#, and he's decided to have one
of his guys write each new mobile app in java or objective c, despite the fact
that no one else has experience in these languages.

but most of all, i know i'm one day going to have to look at the code base for
one of these apps, and I dread it.

~~~
natfriedman
Drop me an email - nat@xamarin.com. We'll help you out :-)

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danabramov
I love Xamarin's support and devs. The devs are extremely friendly.

The tools are getting better with each release.

Kudos to Miguel, Nat, Rolf, Seb and other folks I don't know :-)

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autodidakto
I had high hopes for Xamarin. The appeal of it was strong: I could program in
a functional language (F#) with libraries (.NET) and share my work with
friends on Mac, Windows, Linux, and Mobile.

Unfortunately nothing worked. I was blocked at every turn.

The FSharp.core assembly is in someway there and not there (create a project
and it's in error-red text, but the compiled app runs). I asked and asked on
the IRC channel how to fix it. Programs compiled in Xamarin would work on the
host OS, but on Windows would complain about missing assembly. The same
project on Xamarin would not compile in Visual studio for the same reason. I
never figured out how to properly build executables for both windows and both,
or how to arrange my project files to work on Xamarin Studio and Visual
Studio. I never figured out how to fix this.

I also tried to play with GTK with F#. Their GTK builder is C# only. OK, fine.
F# isn't 1/10 as popular as C#. I know.

So how about iphone? I could drop ObjC, rewrite my app in a language I admire,
and finally bring my app to android. However, the sample F# ios app, without
modifications, compiles to an executable that is too big for the trial
limitation of Xamarin Studio. Wait, the sample "hello world" app (which is
supposed to convince that the IDE is worth paying for) can't be run in the
trial version of Xamarin Studio? I asked and lurked for days in the IRC
channel. In a patronizing exchange with one of the developers, I was told that
the Fsharp assembly needs to be embedded into the ios binary. Because of this,
the trial limit is reached. An update will fix this later.

Oh well. Nevermind. Once again, I'll shelve the idea of cross platform
development.

~~~
_random_
Common, F# is like 1% of their customers. Even Microsoft does not support F#
as much as C#. JetBrains ignore it as well. I keep coming back to this
language but I see no enthusiasm in Microsoft for it.

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bigdubs
I love mono. I think it's a great thing to try and bring .net/C# to more
people.

But seriously guys, can we get System.Data.SqlClient to the point that it's
production ready? the only thing that's holding us back from rolling mono in
production for our entire stack.

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yesimahuman
They seem like an awesome company. Very inspiring and hope they do well.

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_random_
It's awesome they exist. Otherwise it would've been HTML5 vs native. First
won't be ready for a long time, second means different high-level languages
for each platform.

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alttab
Congrats guys! Solid second round. The product concept is great.

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Maven911
Tive seen their ads on YouTube constantly

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chrisdevereux
Does mono support RX and LINQ? That would be reason enought to think about
switching from Obj-C.

~~~
_random_
LINQ is a language feature. RX is a paradigm in a form of an open-source
library: [https://rx.codeplex.com/](https://rx.codeplex.com/)

~~~
chrisdevereux
Ah that's interesting. I for some reason assumed that the C# implementation
was an addition to the language.

