[atwebb]

I realize that the difference of $700 could be made up in improved development performance but I really, really wish they'd allow VS support for the indie license. It's not a case of saving more it's a risk/reward thing for me. I can see the possible value but, without being able to pick it up quickly in an environment I know I can't justify either spending an extra $700 or picking up another IDE/workspace along with the curve of mobile dev and setups for the different devices. Though I understand the cost, it provides tremendous value and you can't just give that away for free.

[AUmrysh]

It's clear to me that Xamarin is trying to get everyone to pay right now. The free license won't even allow you to build the Xamarin.Forms demo, and Forms is one of the most significant new features they added. Cross platform apps with a common UI and codebase, no more separate views for each platform, and data binding! I think they're scaring off small developers by requiring the several hundred dollar investment to use Xamarin, even if it is a great product.

Where I work, we chose Xamarin over PhoneGap/Cordova.

[pauloortins]

Totally agree. Prices could be lower and they would have a bigger market share in mobile development.

[tejas-manohar]

Good decision since Xamarin is much more native when compared to PhoneGap/Cordova (Titanium is another thing I've been looking at). The student discounts for $99/year/platform should be the normal price.

[McGnarlySheen]

Every benefit you just mentioned PhoneGap/Cordova has... and it's free...

[pauloortins]

Have you ever tried Xamarin Studio? It's not as good as Visual Studio but it's a very decent IDE. I'm currently using it instead Visual Studio.

[eropple]

I disagree. The core write-your-code experience is full of jank, to the point where I have wondered in the past whether the XS folks develop it in XS. Its smart indentation isn't smart (randomly indenting another three levels, not being smart enough to stick to the indent level I pick when I backspace to where I want it--next line, back out there again!) and occasionally the text widget will "lose" a line of text and take a few seconds to remember that it actually exists.

The Xamarin toolchain has steadily improved and its PCL support makes a lot of things a lot easier, but I can't envision a use case where I would want to do my development in their IDE. I keep a Windows machine just to have VS so I can do the 90% case there and suffer through the 10% in XS.

[jstedfast]

Everyone on the Xamarin Studio team uses Xamarin Studio to develop Xamarin Studio.

Smart Indent, afaik, has been fixed. The problem you describe was only an issue for multi-line lambdas, iirc.

[eropple]

The line issue pops up for me in regular control for blocks and I'm using the most recent beta (which I'm uncomfortable doing but had to do to get anywhere). My indenting still gets very confused anywhere I have #if blocks.

You know I like you guys, I loved doing GSoC with Mono and I wouldn't have interviewed over there if i didn't like what you're trying to do, but these issues make it really hard recommend Xamarin. Having my IDE make me legitimately mad is a bummer.

[exhilaration]

Is it significantly different from Visual Studio? How easily could a VS user transition to it?

I think I'd be willing to drop $300 of my own money if I could put my many years of C# experience to work developing iOS and Android apps.

[mikeblue]

We just did a webinar about Xamarin Studio last week in case you're interested http://xamarin.wistia.com/medias/z797ghqlps

[pauloortins]

Great! Can I add it to the post?

[mikeblue]

Sure. It's probably better to link to the blog post that has the video and the slides available: http://blog.xamarin.com/webinar-recording-native-mobile-apps...

[pauloortins]

The only thing that I'm really missing is Resharper. For other things XS is very similar to VS. Remember that the cost is $300 for each platform, so you have to spend $600.