Adobe AIR vs Visual Studio IDE

• Fast of build project: very good tools to developers
• Multiplatform: has the promise of deploying one application package for multiple platforms
• Easy of use: fast developing
• Perfect tools: instrument are simply but powerful
• Good documentation
• Make App for Android, iOS, Desktop
• It's very time/cost efficient: saves great amount of time

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• Since Microsoft offers a free Community Edition of the IDE many of our new developers have used it at home or school and are very familiar with the user interface, requiring little training to move up to the paid, enterprise-friendly editions we use.
• The online community support for Visual Studio is outstanding, as solid or better than any other commercial or open-source project software.
• Microsoft continuously keeps the product up to date and has maintained a history of doing so. They use it internally for their own development so there is little chance it will ever fall out of favor and become unsupported.

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• It is cumbersome to update if you use Flash Builder.
• It still relies on Flash and vector graphics and therefore can have poor performance unless you are using a third-party library such as Starling.
• It is updated somewhat slowly and is still missing some useful features such as controller support.

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• Certain settings and features can sometimes be challenging to locate. The interface isn't always intuitive.
• Sometimes there are too many ways to do the same thing. For example, users can quickly add a new workspace in Source Control Explorer when a local path shows as "Not Mapped," but it doesn't indicate that the user might want to check the dropdown list of workspaces. The shortcut of creating a new workspace by clicking on the "Not Mapped" link can lead to developers creating too many workspaces and causing workspace management to become unwieldy. If the shortcut link were removed, the user would be forced to use the Workspace dropdown. While it can add an extra step to the process, workspaces would be managed more easily, and this would enforce consistency. At the very least, there should be a high-level administrative setting to hide the shortcut link.

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• Allows easy porting of functionality and look and feel to many diverse platforms.
• Shorten development and deployment time.
• Reduced training and support costs by re-using common widgets.

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• We've had hundreds of hours saved by the rapid development that Visual Studio provides.
• We've lost some time in the Xamarin updates. However, being cross platform, we ultimately saved tons of time not having to create separate apps for iOS and Android.

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