Recently, we at Fingertip Tech, INC have been doing a lot of work in Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms. All in all, things have been going fairly well and the tooling seems to get better everyday! Still, nothing is perfect and at the end of the day working with the Xamarin toolchain is a decsion that has to made on a per project basis and will greatly depend on the overall budget for the project and its maintenance. We are still evaluating Xamarin.Forms but the following are my findings and observations of working with Xamarin classic.
The Good: C# is an absolutely amazing language and every .Net developer ought to apologize to every Java for not spreading the word on just how phenominal the langauge really is. I know that will be a controlversial statment and the Java VS C# debate is a post for another day, but if you haven’t ever done any work in a modern version of C#, then I urge you to give it a shot and try to have an open mind.
Xamarin Studio is a pretty good IDE on Mac OS X and XCode developers will be familar with the IDE’s layout and overall setup – additionally, if you have ever used a modern version of MonoDevelop, you’ll be in pretty good shape. Additionally, the setup process on Mac OS X was pretty straightforward and I was impressed the Xamarin was able to tie into my iOS development tool-chain, pulling up my simulators and my code-signing credentials. On the iOS side, Xamarin does a great job of supporting storyboard and nib files for user-interface design and is no too shabby on the Android side also; however, Android UIs are still best done in the XML layout files directly.
Despite being in C# rather than Objective-C or Java, Xamarin is a faithful port of just about all of the native iOS and Android APIs. In fact, if you know how to do something with say UITableView in Objective-C, then you pretty much are good to go in Xamarin.
The Bad: Working in Xamarin Studio is great! Well, that’s as long as you are working on Mac OS X. The Windows version of Xamarin Studio is nowhere near as polished or as reliable as its Mac sister. For example, on my Windows 8.1 machine, there is an issue in Xamarin Studio that incorrectly highlights correct code as erroneous. Additionally, the intellisense and related features just aren’t as reliable on Windows. AlthoughIt is likely that a good number of developers using Xamarin on Windows would prefer to work in Visual Studio, there is little excuse for the way Xamarin Studio runs on that platform and frankly it makes it seem like Windows users who have not paid for access to the Visual Studio integration are not as much of a priority as those using Visual Studio or Mac.
The Ugly: Once upon a time, developers the world over were used to paying for by the seat licences for software development tools and even progreamming languages. Xamarin is trying pretty hard to bring that back but I’m not sure it works. Something about the per seat pricing model rubs me the wrong way. Additionally, up until just the other week, no form of mothly subscription billing was available and even to date there is no monthly pricing for anything beyond the ‘Indie’ plan. As the owner of a small but still bigger than five person software development company, I find their drawing the line between ‘Indie’ and ‘Business’ at the seemingly arbitrary number of five just a bit too well… arbitrary for my tastes. Additionally, there are plenty of companies like mine that would probably prefer to not be billed seperately for iOS and Android. All of this creates a sort of complexity that just doesn’t jive with what is otherwise a clean and very customer friendly offering.
Overall, I am pretty happy with how well Xamarin is working out for us and plant to continue working in it. Follow me on Twitter or Google+. Interested in getting your app project off the ground? Then, contact Fingertip Tech, INC and forget to follow us on Twitter!
