Xamarin: seamless C# .NET development for MacOS
August 18, 2017
Xamarin: seamless C# .NET development for MacOS
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Xamarin
The product development team was building a cross-platform endpoint security product in C# .NET and all used MacBook Pros, so Xamarin was the IDE of choice. It addressed the problem of being able to develop the Linux and Mac versions of the product without having to have a Linux VM for Linux development and also made it possible to develop the cross-platform portions of the software natively on their Macs, rather than using a Windows VM. Only Windows-specific development and testing needed to be done within a VM. As a product development startup, all but one employee used Xamarin.
- Good interactive debugger.
- Built on Atom, many of the same useful functionality as the more generic editor.
- Many good plugins for various other programming languages and other functionality.
- Atom's multi-cursor plugin would be a welcome plugin to this IDE as well.
- The online support could be further developed.
- The application would occasionally crash.
- Time saved avoiding having to switch to a Linux VM while developing cross-platform C# .NET applications on a MacOS.
- Enabled more developers to comfortably work on the cross-platform portions of the applications (versus the web-based portions of the application).
- Could be configured to write both C# .NET as well as Javascript, reducing the number of IDEs needed to develop across the stack.
- Atom, Eclipse and Visual Studio IDE
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.