Apache Cordova vs. Microsoft Visual Studio vs. Xamarin

It is suitable for making portable applications, with almost the same code for several platforms. You can access native features of the device or use an open source plug-in from the repository to create a local database and access the internal storage of the device. It is wonderful for the construction of a native application, through the use of standard web code. It is not recommended for enterprise applications.

Incentivized

When working with base C# code for desktop and web projects, then Microsoft Visual Studio is ideal as it provides the libraries and interfaces needed to quickly create, test and deploy solutions. It is when slightly more complex scenarios are required that issues can arise. The built-in integration for things like PowerBI Paginated Reports and dashboards is far from ideal.

Incentivized

If you are required to develop applications that are cross-platformed, Xamarin is a great tool to use. It will help save time and effort from your development team to be able to build applications seamlessly for android, IOS, Windows, and web on a single platform instead of requiring multiple tools to get the job done.

Incentivized

• Adobe Phone Gap has an extremely simple user interface that allows for easy learning to occur.
• Adobe Phone Gap provides support for web languages and allows you to write in three of the main languages and transfer them to another language for use. This solves a common programming issue and is the greatest strength of the software.
• Their desktop application allows for easy installation and programming.
• Adobe provides quick support with questions about how to use the software.
• The build interface notifies you of errors extremely quickly and helps identify the issue in your programming. You get an easy idea of what needs to be updated and adjusted.

Incentivized

• I like how the tabs and panels are organized; everything is gathered together so you can find what you're looking for quickly.
• If you can't find something, there's a thorough search engine that searches all of Visual Studio's features.
• The Team Foundation Server feature is fantastic since it allows us to easily deploy and roll back changes on the server.

• Xamarin allows you to write cross platform code. This allows companies to build apps more quickly by writing less code. Having code abstracted and reused across multiple platforms allows for more testing and less issues overall.
• The ability to use Visual Studio is a huge plus. Visual Studio is one of the best IDE's available and being able to write cross platforms apps while in a great IDE makes everything less painful.
• Xamarin is now free with a large company backing. This means that bugs on the platform get fixed more quickly and there is a large community of developers.

Incentivized

• Cordova app code runs inside a webview component. So, expect the performance to be a little slower as compared to the native apps. This is more noticeable on older devices though. It is hardly noticeable when it comes to newer mobile devices.
• Crashes can be hard to debug since the crash logs will not point you to the culprit javascript code. This is not a limitation of Cordova alone. Any other hybrid mobile app development platform suffers the same problem.
• Even with tools like Safari debugger and Chrome debugger, it can be tricky to measure graphics and animation performance. Achieving smooth animations can be a bit of a challenge sometimes with hybrid mobile apps in general.

Incentivized

• Would be great if there was a better way to save and restore open tabs.
• The built-in test runner can be improved, for example, by adding the ability to save a set of commonly run tests, etc.
• Better integration for Microsoft SQL server would be great.

Incentivized

• Forms - not 100% there. Still needs work but is production ready.
• iOS - sometimes errors can be hard to understand, if they even show up.
• Insights - Xamarin offers their own crash analytics software. However, it's not perfect and sometimes doesn't pick up crashes.

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VS is the best and is required for building Microsoft applications. The quality and usefulness of the product far out-weight the licensing costs associated with it.

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Xamarin has been great for developing different projects efficiently and effectively. It's nice to reuse the core business logic across different platforms so that there are less to maintain and little replications are needed. The biggest benefit is that C# programmers do not have to learn a different language to do mobile development.

Incentivized

I love the overall usability of Microsoft Visual Studio. I’ve been using this IDE for more than 20 years, and I’ve seen it evolve by leaps and bounds. Today, with AI and code-suggestion/completion features, developers no longer need to remember countless libraries, methods, or language syntax, or invest a huge amount of programming effort to complete a project. It truly offers everything a developer needs to program, debug, test, and deploy in a single IDE.

Incentivized

If you are required to develop applications that are cross-platformed, Xamarin is a great tool to use. It will help save time and efforts from your development team to be able to build applications seamlessly for android, IOS, windows, and web on a single platform instead of requiring multiple tools to get the job done

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There are many resources available supporting Visual Studio IDE. Microsoft whitepapers, forum posts, and online Visual Studio documentation. There are countless demonstration videos available, as well. If users are having issues, they can call Microsoft Support, but depending on the company's agreement with Microsoft, the number of included support calls will vary from organization to organization. I've found that Microsoft support calls can be hit or miss depending on who you get, but they can usually get you with the right support person for your issue.

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I never had to contact support for any help. Most of the problems we ran into, we were able to identify and use peer support through blogs and other internet sources to resolve the problems. There are plenty of sources online which provide tutorials, discuss problems, etc. Example: StackOverflow

Incentivized

IT is very complicated to understand all the functions that the environment has if you are not familiar with this type of development environments. It is important to select a good in-person training to achieve to understand all the possibilities and the capacity of the application. In this case, you will be able to develop a lot type of different applications.

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If you are not accustomed to develop in this type of development environments it would be complicated to follow all the parts of the course because if the course does not include a great tour with all the concepts to develop you will not have the option to understand all the functions.

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Just with any programming tasks, have a plan first. Design out the system, spend time to build it correctly the first time and have plenty of testing and user acceptance opportunities. Xamarin was easy to implement for a C# programmer. However, you need to do tutorials to realize the platform's capabilities.

Incentivized

Apache Cordova is the mother of all other frameworks. The Ionic developed framework is well suited for development but most of their features are offered by paid services. As Apache Cordova is open source and has a license to modify it, it has no legal problems to work with it. Also, most well-known IDEs recognize the Apache Cordova snippets.

Incentivized

I personally feel Visual Studio IDE has [a] better interface and [is more] user friendly than other IDEs. It has better code maintainability and intellisense. Its inbuilt team foundation server help coders to check on their code then and go. Better nugget package management, quality testing and gives features to extract TRX file as result of testing which includes all the summary of each test case.

Xamarin runs natively on MacOS, and the debugger and other integration and auto-complete tools are far better than Eclipse for C# .NET. It also carries much of the plugin/add-on capabilities that are so desirable on Atom. Eclipse is a better for generalized software development, provided a developer is comfortable switching between the IDE the command line for certain parts of their workflow, like building, package management, or debugging. But for C# .NET development on MacOS specifically, Xamarin is the best product I've used for the job.

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• Very economic for ROI purposes
• Scalable for code reusability down the road
• Convertible, easily switch platforms if Apache Cordova doesn't suit your needs

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• Using the integration between Visual Studio and our source control service, the cost of re-work and losing code is drastically reduced.
• Paid versions of Visual Studio enable developers to be so much more productive than hacked-together open source solutions that it's hard to imagine developing in Windows without it.
• When combined with support subscriptions and the vast array of free online help options available, Visual Studio saves our developers time by keeping them coding and testing, not wasting their time trying to guess their way out of problems or spend endless hours online hoping to find answers.

Incentivized

• Saves development time and deliver fast.
• Allows inhouse developers build both Android and iOS application without switching languages.
• Allows use coding in C# in Visual studio IDE from which we can code in different languages. We don't need multiple IDEs installed

Incentivized