Microsoft have acquired Xamarin
 

More details here

Re: Microsoft have acquired Xamarin
 

I wouldn't be surprised if their goal was the exact opposite.

Re: Microsoft have acquired Xamarin
 

its fine we have qt

Re: Microsoft have acquired Xamarin
 

Apparently some devs want .Net to run on linux...

I'm going to take a guess these are Microsoft devs?

Re: Microsoft have acquired Xamarin
 

.Net already runs on many platforms. It's called Mono.

Re: Microsoft have acquired Xamarin
 

Not always. Some clients have invested heavily into .NET components and/or libraries. And when that happens, you like to have an option or two and in some cases, Mono was a good enough choice.

True story... once I inherited a project that banked on a closed source C# *.dll at the center of their process that they wanted me to wrap with some Mono .NET web services that would hit this *.dll and spit out their values that were embedded in that damn *.dll. Had to write something that would accomplish this for those cheapskates until they either got the source for that *.dll or they figured out the 7+ years of research into the algorithms (which SHOULD HAVE been in the goddamn database) using Mono... ugh.

And no. I was not (at that time) a .NET dev. But I can program - it's all just syntax. The rest is just being a petty ****er about what pays the bills.

Re: Microsoft have acquired Xamarin
 

Re: Microsoft have acquired Xamarin
 

Didn't work. Tried it, it failed. Thanks for the already tried option though.

Re: Microsoft have acquired Xamarin
 

are they functionally equivalent? i have always understood QT to be a GUI framework with useful hooks into various hardware/software services, while the application logic would likely reside elsewhere.

in referring to xamarin as something that would replace .dotnet i presume this was something designed to create the core application logic around, with some gui presentation capability bolted on.

beware, i'm not a software developer/engineer.

Re: Microsoft have acquired Xamarin
 

Between the two, Qt and .NET are not really the same. Folks will say so, but on the .NET side, if you want to do a lot of UI, you will find it woefully short on some methods and that's where Infragistics or Telerik libraries comes in to sorta "save the day" (read: they add a lot of heft to your code)

I always felt like Qt was more lightweight compared to .NET, but fundamentally they are not truly the same - the .NET CLR alone makes a big difference to me. In Qt, I always felt like I was more of a UI dev whereas in .NET I feel like I'm more of the backend.

But that's my personal experience where Qt was what drove the UI mostly with C++ or Python running the data and connections. In .NET, I don't come out of C# to do most of that (some XAML for UI if I don't use the aforementioned libraries)... but your mileage may vary.

To me, buying Xamarin is sorta huge because of three reasons: Visual Studio runs only on Windows but the free Community Edition that allows for plugins, libraries and Azure connectivity is basically a fully functioning IDE as you'd pay for it - but it's only on Windows; the .NET CLR has been ported to other operating systems and made open source for quite some time but no tool really captured the attention of the folks that weren't using Windows; this addresses the lack of being able to code and port code from a different direction than the failed Project Astoria which promised Android runtime ports of apps... this is how you build your apps and have it run in many other places Microsoft normally do not run.

I'm not exactly a fan of Microsoft but some of their recent moves are pretty darn cool in my book. Visual Studio Code, Hololens, and this are worth my attention.

Windows 10 and my privacy though... meh