Monday, April 29, 2013

Miguel de Icaza: Mono, Open Source, Visual Studio, and Xamarin


At Xamarin Evolve 2013, I caught up with Xamarin CTO Miguel de Icaza after his keynote. It's been a while since I last chatted with Miguel, so it was great to catch up. Clearly, he and team have been very busy pushing Mono forward and building Xamarin—a new technology that enables developers to target multiple platforms by writing apps in C# and .NET. During his keynote, Miguel announced that F# is now a part of the Xamarin family, too. 

Xamarin ships with a Visual Studio plugin, making it possible to write iOS and Android apps on Windows using the best IDE in the world. Of course, VS natively supports the development of Windows and Windows Phone .NET apps, so you can imagine that Xamarin makes it possible for .NET developers to target all major mobile platforms, sharing as much core code as possible across them - effectively enabling C# to be everywhere you want it to be.

Here, we learn why Miguel et al. started Mono, how they ended up at Xamarin, and, potentially, where they're heading in the future with their excellent cross platform development technologies based on .NET. We talk about open source and proprietary software today, Visual Studio, and more. This is a Channel 9 interview, so it goes as it went. The only editing was cosmetic, not topical. Tune in.

Read more: Channel9
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