Xamarin's Tiny Cuts

JonathanPeppers

I recently wrote a blog post titled Xamarin's Tiny Cuts.

It is basically a list of small bugs that get annoying while doing Xamarin development.

I wanted to open this up for discussion, to see if others are dealing with some of the same little "cuts" as me. My goal here is not criticism, as Xamarin tools are absolutely wonderful. I hope I am in a position to point things out and make the experience better for all developers using Xamarin.

I want to challenge Xamarin to make their experience even more amazing than it is right now.

SubhankarGanguly

pls tell me how to start writing cross platform apps in xamarin...i am totally new in c# and xamarine.if anybody can provide couple of example it would be very helpful for me....i am totally confused....

JonathanPeppers

Sorry, you might be a little off topic from my post.

I'd recommend reading Xamarin's docs on cross platform development like this:

Sharing Code Options - http://docs.xamarin.com/guides/cross-platform/application_fundamentals/building_cross_platform_applications/sharing_code_options

I'd also recommend trying out some of these books:

Mobile Dev w/ C# - http://www.amazon.com/Mobile-Development-Building-Android-Applications/dp/1449320236/ref=la_B007N3K9QC_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1379964509&sr=1-1

Any of the Wrox books - http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/WroxTitle/Professional-Android-Programming-with-Mono-for-Android-and-NET-C-.productCd-1118222156.html

or

http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/WroxTitle/Professional-iPhone-Programming-with-MonoTouch-and-NET-C-.productCd-047063782X.html

For a real-world example (and sample source code), check out the Xamarin Field Service app - http://xamarin.com/prebuilt/fieldservice

OysteinKrog_InitialForce

Good blog post, we've certainly seen many of the same issues. Thankfully the experience is overall "ok" in that things do tend to work out after some problem-solving.

Using Xamarin Studio is not an option for us, it's just far inferior to the Visual Studio experience, even with all the bugs that the xamarin extensions have (We've still not been able to get debugging to work with our full app)

Personally I feel that one of the big issues is that Xamarin does tend to over-promise a little bit, e.g. the "async" support was promised/"delivered" waaay before it was ready.

CodeMonkey

It annoys me when Xamarin shouts about all the new features its adding, when many of the current features are not stable/working. Async/Await is of no use to me if the IDE crashes every hour. PCL's are another example, stop adding new stuff, fix the old stuff.

I really enjoy using Xamarin and the issues we experience on a day to day basis are annoying and sometimes time consuming, but we do produce results in the end. However for the price you pay for this product, there really should be a STABLE channel to work from. Also the time consuming nature of some of the issues we encounter start to erode the cost savings Xamarin is trying to offer.

JonathanPeppers

I have gotten a really good response from Xamarin so far. Miguel passed my post around to their different teams (and I had a couple Xamarin employees contact me separately), so it seems like they are really wanting to fix these things.

In a week or two, I'll post a follow up post.

JonathanPeppers

A follow-up post (also about Xamarin 3) here - http://jonathanpeppers.com/Blog/xamarin-3-and-healed-cuts