Bryfry33

Xamarin was the second-most dreaded toolchain according to last year’s Stack Overflow survey. Why do you think that may be, and how do you and the team plan on turning that around?

Edit: I was being a bit too harsh here and have revised some of my thoughts that made me post this- some of which were incorrect.

I definitely sympathize with the difficulty of the problem you’re trying to solve, to also reference the other comment in response to mine. As well as some of the constraints you’re dealing with- I too hope .NET Standard cleans up a lot of issues and your time is freed up now that it’s stabalized.

But I don’t think that addresses a fair criticism of Xamarin’s stability as a framework and robustness as a toolchain. That list does have Cordova just above Xamarin- is that the standard? Considering that React Native was considerably lower on that list and considerably higher on the “loved” list. Survey’s aside, is it Xamarin’s goal to be a genuine contender for developers, especially younger ones? Or a toolchain for those already involved with .NET? I don’t see how Xamarin doesn’t stop shedding developers as PWAs and the flutters of the world move in, if it doesn’t directly provide an answer on par with its competitors, namely React, whether that’s fair or not.

And it’s not just compile times, I know that stuff comes with the territory. But the iOS designer has nowhere near the capability of Xcode- again, okay, but the Xcode support was pretty bad for a long time. The profiler was unusable for, literally, years- and retroactively put in preview. And still isn’t easily integrated in to the IDE. The inspector is dead? I believe the Test Recorder is dead as well. Live Player was a response to your Android emulator, yea? It didn’t really work outside of Forms early on- I haven’t tried recently. The VS for Mac debugger was telling me everything was null for a bit there. But Workbooks is getting development resources? It feels like Xamarin chases the next big thing, over stability, only to eventually scuttle it. And that’s not even mentioning the API bugs, which have been better more recently, I’ll admit.

I guess I just wonder with all this how a company is supposed to feel comfortable going forward with Xamarin when the onus is, although unfairly, on you to prove why not React or even native.

If you ever see this- I went back and looked at some of the newer developments with Workbooks. It is pretty cool and I can see almost all of my inspector use-cases being replaced by it (recently lost my enterprise license it turns out, so inspector hadn’t been showing up). And it provides another point in favor of the toolchain. I hope the designer gets better, but that you still focus a bit on ensuring Xcode IB support. Apologies for being too harsh, I just really want Xamarin to succeed long term.