AndroidLast week when I was the guest speaker on Xojo’s webinar on consulting, I fielded a question regarding. The basic gist of the question was if I felt that Xamarin was a threat to Xojo. At the time I had heard of Xamarin and read a few articles on it but that was about it. In the week since I’ve been doing more research on the topic. Xamarin is an interesting development tool. To sum up what it is in a sentence or two probably does it some injustice but here’s my take.
Xamarin takes the C# language and.NET framework and has ported it to Mac OS X, iOS, and Android. This allows developers to use the Visual Studio IDE on Windows, and Xamarin Studio users on Mac OS X and Linux to create native Mac OS X, iOS, Android apps, in addition to Windows desktop and Windows Phone apps. I threw Mac OS X in there since it’s listed on their website but it appears to more of an afterthought since the focus seems to be on mobile applications. Indeed, their mantra is that they want to make the best development experience for mobile applications.
I am not a C# developer but like most modern languages it’s not the language that’s difficult to learn it’s the framework and.NET is arguably one of the biggest and most advanced frameworks around. Having the.NET framework available for iOS, Android, and Mac OS X is a huge advantage for anyone already familiar with it. Theoretically it should make the transition from Windows developer to cross-platform developer very easy. Xamarin uses native platform user interfaces and compiles to native applications for each supported platform. This is good in that you get the best of each platform. The not so good is that it appears that you’ll end up coding each user interface separately (see Xamarin.Forms later on). I can see the arguments going both ways on this whether this is good or bad.
Visual Studio for Mac was recently released. In a previous post I compared how much easier it is to make native Mac apps with Xojo than with Visual Studio for Mac. Now I’d like to talk about making cross-platform desktop apps. Jun 3, 2018 - Making a Web App: Comparing Xojo and Visual Studio for Mac. Published June 5, 2017 by Paul Lefebvre. In previous articles, I've written.
Unlike Xojo, Xamarin does not have a built-in forms editor. They give the option of building Cocoa and Cocoa-touch applications strictly via code or by using Apples Interface Builder. You either stay in Xamarin to build everything via code or you exit to Interface Builder to design your UI.
I can’t imagine that’s very efficient but Interface Builder wasn’t always integrated in Xcode either. As a developer you have to roll with the punches. The Xamarin framework has some cross-platform calls to make life easier, but when it comes to iOS and Mac OS coding it appears that most of it is similar to Xojo’s ability to make declares into the native OS. Again, you might call this a strength as you get the Apple methods but it also means that you’ll need to know each target OS in detail which can be a rather large learning curve.
Xojo abstracts as much of the platform as possible which means that a TextField on Mac OS has mostly the same capabilities as a TextField in Windows and Linux. The strength in Xojo means that you don’t need to know the details of each platform but it also means that you generally get a compromise in functionality. This is where system declares can really aid the Xojo developer. Web Presentation Xamarin’s website is gorgeous.
Nearly everywhere you go there are very helpful tutorials and videos explaining how to do things. It’s also laid out in such a way that you can quickly find things. The Xojo website is okay and relatively easy to find things but Xamarin goes out of their way to convince you to use their development tool. The tagline on the Xamarin home page is “Create native iOS, Android, Mac and Windows apps in C#. Join our community of 687,765 developers.” Practically everything about the website screams, “ Use me and you’ll make a great applications!” It’s very professional looking and it’s all business. The tagline on the Xojo website reads, “ Create powerful multi-platform desktop, web & web-mobile apps. Fast development.
Easy deployment.” It’s not that Xojo doesn’t attract professional developers but their emphasis is on different things. One thing that surprised me quite a bit was under the Support/Consulting Partners menu of the Xamarin website.
It’s a listing of Xamarin consultants and they are listed by tier (authorized or premier), by geographical region, and by expertise. The Xojo website has the page. The first says that it’s a serious language with a lot of software development partners and the other says that it’s a smaller community. IDE Comparison The Xamarin IDE is fairly simple and seems to be a hybrid between Xojo and Xcode.
Their Solutions pane is not nearly as complex as the Navigator and is far simpler and easier to use, in my opinion. The Solutions list only shows objects unlike the Xojo Navigator that shows everything (methods, properties, constants, enums, etc) as you drill down into the object. As you select an object in the Solutions list the source code editor loads all your source code. If I had a major beef with Xojo is that they try too hard to dumb down the IDE. You can’t just start typing away like you can in practically every other language/development environment I’ve ever seen.
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