Any LiveCoders who also use Xamarin?

[Mark Wilcox]

> I'm in an slightly weird situation with a client where they want me to
> use
> Xamarin instead of LiveCode for a project (for internal 'political'
> reasons
> as much as anything as far as I can see) - have any of you tried Xamarin
> and
> if so what did you think of it?

I think the important thing to know about Xamarin before getting started
is that there are 2 very different ways to do the UI. One is to build a
separate UI for each platform and there Xamarin really just provides
thin (auto-generated) C# wrappers around the platform UI components - so
you have to learn the APIs for each platform. The other is
Xamarin.Forms, which is a true cross-platform solution but relatively
limited and designed for rapid application development.

Xamarin is pretty capable (indeed you can access any native API) but
performs quite poorly on Android if you need to call the Android Java
APIs a lot. Nothing you'd worry about in an "enterprise" app but
probably not advisable for a mass market consumer effort.

Depending on what platforms you need to support, whether you can use
Forms, and whether or not you already know C#, there can be a pretty
steep learning curve.

Hope that helps,
Mark