On: Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when pr...

[billfruit]

Perhaps Xamarin is a good choice as well for who want to transition from development of desktop apps. Also support for F# on Xamarin is also a plus.

[graydsl → billfruit]

I was waiting for someone to mention Xamarin. :D

I haven't worked with the platform for 2 to 3 years. In my old job we had massive problems at the end hence we switched to native (we were an agency).

Problems we had:

* Deploying to devices was painfully slow compared to native stack.

* We all had Macs and the tooling (Visual Studio for Mac/MonoDevelop) was pretty bad compared to Android Studio.

* Wrapping 3rd party native libs was a pain, if not impossible. Especially in a stressful agency environment.

When we heard about the acquisition of Xamarin by Microsoft I was hopeful things would change to the better. But month later they rebranded MonoDevelop and focused on integrating Azure.

Did it get any better?

[pjmlp → graydsl]

Visual Studio for Mac has suffered quite a refactoring after the acquisition, as many of the MonoDevelop internals have been refactored into common libraries shared between Visual Studio and Visual Studio for Mac, one of the reasons why the new plugin infrastructure is based on .NET instead of COM.

There a release event happening next month, https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/mac/event/