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Comment by V-2 | Hacker News Reader

Incidentally, JetBrains is starting out with Project Rider (a C# IDE).

I've been working professionally with Xamarin for the past month, honestly I'm shocked how half-baked Xamarin Studio is, both in terms of stability and features. (Since we develop for iOS, we use Macs and VS is not an option).

Of course now that Microsoft has stepped in all the way, things may turn around, but my feeling is that the best window of opportunity for JetBrains would be to provide compelling Xamarin tooling on non-Windows platforms. That's the weak spot of their mammoth competitor as far as C# goes

https://forums.xamarin.com/discussion/62250/vote-for-project...

https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/oauth?state=%2Fissue%2FRIDER-...

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JetBrains need to get better --far better-- at providing support. In fact, I think they need to have full-time, US-based, knowledgeable support. I've been using their tools for years. We own a few full-product-line subscriptions yet every single time we have to ask for support I know it will be a disappointing experience.

We don't do it that frequently, maybe two to four times a year. And, when we do, you can be the problem was well researched and we simply ran into a wall. Between the time it takes for them to get back to you and some of the answers that come back, well, it's less than ideal. This is harsh, but sometimes I think "you might as well have asked me to re-install Windows to fix the problem".

What ends-up happening is that we will generally google the heck out of the problem, post it on SO and experiment and sometimes figure it out. In other cases you just give up and live with the issues.

On the developer side MS has far better support and the community of developers using their tools is much larger, which means you have a higher probability of finding one or more answers to your problem.

Still. Love JetBrains tools. I just wish they'd take support seriously.

You could have hooked a Mac up to Visual Studio for building and Deploying Xamarin apps. I used to have a Mac mini on my desk for this.

Here's the instructions btw. https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/ios/getting_started/ins...

That's for people who don't usually use Macs. Parent is in the opposite situation.

I run a Mac VM using hackintosh on my windows box!

VS + MacVM = how iOS dev should be ;)

Is it difficult to set up?

The VM or Visual Studio?

The VM? A coworker had no problems installing OS X in VMWare for his pet project, less than a day.

Visual Studio? This is Microsoft that we're talking about. I haven't done this or seen anyone do it, but I've read articles and it seems as though it has the usual straightforward qualities.

That's possible, true, but the company deemed it too expensive to supply everyone with two computers and then pay for VS licenses on the top of Xamarin licensing (already rather pricey)

As a former manager IT KILLS ME. We spend millions on salaries but we can't spend thousands on hardware? A $700 mac mini is less then a week of salary. Heck the license fees are more then a mac mini.

This same thing works for OS X running on VMware on a Windows host. While it's not officially supported, it works and is pretty simple to get up and running.

Well of course Vs is an option. You just use View models and cover them with unit tests. Then you sacrifice one of your developers on the altar of Jobs and force him to implement your iOS code.

Our mac loving c# developers use parallels, perhaps that's an option for you

:) The idea is that everybody works on Android and iOS alike, no specialization on the team. And the UI itself (Xamarin.Forms) takes the bulk of our development time, we're running into so many quirks, and the cross-platform abstraction is very leaky unfortunately. So your recommendation may be good, but I don't think it would pan out in our particular scenario. Especially since the team consists of people with no prior exposure to Xamarin (C#/MVVM devs + me, an Android dev with some half-forgotten familiarity with C#), so we've been learning on the job a lot

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