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Comment by DrJokepu | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I'm a bit surprised by the responses in this thread. The rumour might be true or false but that's not what I find surprising.

Are there technical problems regarding the rumour? There are, certainly. However, we developers know that technical problems can be solved and Apple and Microsoft certainly have the resources to do so.

Are there business issues? Is this an unexpected move? Certainly, it is. But Apple has a history of unexpected business moves and business innovation, as does Microsoft even if it is uncool to acknowledge that.

Even if the rumour is false (I don't know) I don't find it unbelievable at all, because (a) it makes sense (b) this move would be both typically "Apple" and typically "Microsoft", if you look at the history of these companies. Hell, Microsoft started as a programming tool company.

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I dare say Microsoft has the best IDE out there.

It does, as it works for a lot of people just fine, but it's not without it's quirks.

Some things that are better in XCode: filtering of options, error bubbles, keyboard mappings.

Some things that are better in MSVC: Debugging! Maybe because I had to use MSVC for the last 10 years, and I'm so used to it. XCode is also not bad, but would need more time adjusting to the keyboard shortcuts

Some things that are better in Eclipse: refactorings. Adding method parameters, changing their order, extracting methods, promoting or demoting classes, etc. At least when it comes to Java, Eclipse seems to have more options and a greater success rate than VS2008 with C#.

Debugging Java with Eclipse is about the same as debugging C# with VS in my experience, though it seems that VS's output console is slower than Eclipse's, and both are slower than a pure terminal.

I hate Eclipse

I have to use both Eclipse and VS2k3/VS2k8/VS2k10 on a daily basis. Sure, eclipse has better refactorings. I would also argue that it's References/Declarations search features are better than the VS equivelents.

But that is the only two features where VS gets eclipsed. VS is an all-round better tool than Eclipse for everything else I need to do. Sure perhaps I can make Eclipse better by searching out some plugin written by some 3rd party, because the 3rd party support/community is better for Eclipse than VS. But from a daily use POV, atleast IMO, VS is simply leaps and bounds beyond Eclipse. VS also cost me $1000, Eclipse didn't cost me anything. So perhaps my view is skewed simply because I'm deluding myself because of my financial outlay, but I'd like to think not.

I don't know about keyboard mappings. I'd rather press F10 to step through code rather than apple key + Shift + P or whatever it is. I'd also rather press F5 to debug than apple key + enter. I also like that tab in visual studio tabs lines if you highlight them instead of replacing them with a tab like xcode does.

Actually I kind of put it wrong - I like Visual Studio debugging keys better, as I spent most of time debugging, but for typing (and since I've moved to emacs for my linux) I prefer XCode (it's not the same but closer).

I hate XCode debugging mappings (but I haven't debug enough on it) :)

They do, and I don't think that's going to change, because Microsoft has a team of developers whose job is to write the software that they use to write software.

If and only if you are targeting Windows and Windows only.

Or, assuming this is true, Mac OS X or iPhone.

It's not, just as much as VS2010 is not the best IDE

Funny how moderation on topics that mention Microsoft is so predictable

I think the problem with most of the unbelievers on this thread is that it doesn't make sense and it doesn't seem like a move Apple would make.

This actually makes a lot of sense considering that right now if you want to develop for the iPhone you need to do so on a Mac. However, there are many developers who use PCs and who would also make good iPhone app developers, but legitimately have no means of doing so.

The technical issues are definitely not insurmountable. Mono, the free CLR implementation, had CLR apps running on iPhone years ago, and several commercial and prominent games were developed with Unity Framework (which is based on Mono). There was even a "MonoTouch" development profile for iP* for MonoDevelop, a popular Mono IDE.

So, not only are the technical issues solvable, but they'd been solved for years by the open-source clone of .NET.

Not all of them ... with both MonoTouch and Unity you need to have a Mac OS X running with XCode installed, otherwise you can't sign, package or test your application in the IPhone emulator.

If this announcement is about developing, packaging and testing iPhone/IPad apps with only a Windows workstation within Visual Studio, then that's certainly good news.

Not to mention that MonoTouch and Unity are legally both in a gray area right now ... because they are explicitly disallowed in the new SDK EULA and Apple hasn't mentioned their official position on them (AFAIK).

I see, thanks for the elaboration.

I want to clarify the legal issue, though. There is no (non-patent) contest on MonoTouch or Unity's right to existence; people are free to make iPhone runtimes, compilers, etc., as much as they want; the issue arises when developers deploy these techs, as Apple's new EULA is applicable only to developers. While the effect may be the same (no use), I think it's an important distinction.

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