Done!
4,377 karma · joined July 19, 2009
For example, I could imagine funding a project that a student might do in 8 weeks over the summer working full-time, or a project that someone might pursue part-time over the course of a year. My guess is that the first type will dominate the applications (and therefore the grantees), but I don't know yet.
That could be experience shipping open source software, a relevant math background, a track record of being great at explaining algorithms, or something else I'm not thinking of right now.
I was inspired to try this experiment by Nadia Eghbal's grant program: https://medium.com/@nayafia/5-000-no-strings-attached-9e7b95...
We have some more details on our blog: https://blog.xamarin.com/xamarin-for-all/
1) We aren't aware of any debugger issues like this. Is it possible you were debugging optimized code which had the local variables optimized away? Similarly, when an uncaught exception is thrown, it comes with a stack trace with line numbers. Were you not getting these?
2) Xamarin does map the entire set of iOS and Android APIs into C#, so yes it is a "wrapper," but you should NOT be limited in what native features you can use. We literally cover almost 100% of the entire set of native APIs. What limitations were you running into?
3) We have a ton of docs at http://developer.xamarin.com including nearly 300 sample apps and a lot of very detailed guides: http://developer.xamarin.com/guides/ Which part of the docs did you find inadequate?
4) We do include XAML intellisense in Xamarin Studio. To get it in Visual Studio you have to install an extension: http://www.cazzulino.com/mobileessentials.html This will be included by default in a future version of Xamarin.
I'm sorry about the trouble you had, and I'd like to get to the bottom of those issues. Please feel free to contact me at nat@xamarin.com.
This includes hundreds of samples: http://developer.xamarin.com/samples-all/
And lots of detailed guides: http://developer.xamarin.com/guides/
And dozens of videos too: http://developer.xamarin.com/videos/
As for Xamarin University, the vast majority of that experience is live, interactive learning with a teacher. That's why it costs money. The recorded versions of those interactive classes aren't that useful on their own. But, we're working on developing some good standalone e-learning content and when we do it will be widely available.
Did you try doing native development with Xamarin? I do want to be clear that Xamarin.Forms is not Xamarin. It's a library that we built to help people quickly write very simple, data-entry style apps. That's why it's called "Forms." It's not intended to be highly performant or to replicate all the per-platform APIs in Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android. For that, you should use the native APIs. We have a little more information about that here:
http://cdn1.xamarin.com/Architecture%20Selector.pdf
And the "What Xamarin approach is right for you?" section on the Xamarin.Forms page:
Before release, we had internally called Xamarin.Forms "duplo," to emphasize that it was for childishly-simple apps and screens, but we couldn't use that (trademarked) name for the release, unfortunately.
That said, of course we still want to address all the issues that you found with Forms. Would you mind dropping me an email - nat@xamarin.com?
First of all, in December we released a new tool called Objective Sharpie that can automatically bind Objective-C libraries into C#:
http://forums.xamarin.com/categories/ObjectiveSharpie
If you're skilled enough to build the Objective-C library, then you'll be able to use Objective Sharpie to create a C# binding. We also have docs on doing this for Java on developer.xamarin.com.
Some of our customers don't have the time or skill to do this themselves, and so we've recently created a bindings team that wraps third-party native libraries for our customers. Many of these end up published on http://components.xamarin.com/ (there are over 300 components now). But some of them we can't immediately publish because we need to get permission from the original library author to redistribute their library. This is especially true for commercial SDKs. But if you contact us directly, we might be able to give you something.
We also do custom bindings through our support team. This is something that unfortunately we haven't made very obvious. But you can just email support@xamarin.com and we can create a binding for you.
Like I said, this is an area we're pretty focused on. If you have any feedback, please feel free to let me know directly: nat@xamarin.com.
http://n631s.blogspot.com/2011/11/children-of-magenta-line.h...
We do offer extended trials (up to 90 days); you just have to email us.
We built Xamarin.Forms because we have lots of enterprise customers building apps with a dozen or more screens doing simple things like tabular data display and data entry, but who have a native UI requirement in their app. Xamarin.Forms should make these types of apps much easier to write quickly.
Xamarin.Forms supports all of XAML 2009 and uses the XAML syntax with its own namespace and types. So, no existing XAML designer will work with Xamarin.Forms. However, the names and properties should be familiar to any experienced XAML developer.
Split panes will be coming to a future version of Xamarin Studio, though.