I subscribed to the Visual Studio forum here and have received over 100 postings in the past week. None of which involved questions about how to do something using Xamarin in Visual Studio. ALL of them were bug reports. Seems to me that it is HIGH TIME for the Xamarin team to SERIOUSLY re-evaluate their STABILITY issues and get this thing stable. If other developers are like me, they are VERY EXCITED about the prospect of developing apps using C#. The idea is AWESOME, and the time savings will be vast. HOWEVER, in my experience, when I actually go from start to finish, and try to deploy to the app store, I hit issue after issue and do not have a HAPPY PATH to deployment.
Here are just a few issues I have encountered since starting to use Xamarin.iOS. Many have been fixed, but why did I ever see them in the first place? How did these Xamarin versions get released with these GLARING SHOW-STOPPING ISSUES ??
- I have had random build issues where it will say that it cannot build because there is a build already in process.
- I have had weird issues where I add all the needed deployment icons, and after closing and reopening it, some icons are missing.
- I have had problems getting the allowable orientations to stay set to where I set them. All the iPad orientations are disabled.
- I have had issues where the PC cannot connect to the MAC build server.
- I have had issues where I couldn't deploy to my iPad device.
- I have had problems getting the proper Certificates and Provisioning profiles to show up in the configuration drop-downs.
I am hoping that there is some sort of unit testing, or QA going on an Xamarin, but I am stunned that so many show stopping errors are getting through to production. Perhaps they just need to have some more end to end testing going on. These are not corner case issues, these are things that any developer using Visual Studio from a Windows box would notice and cannot work around until they are fixed.
PLEASE XAMARIN, I want to be able to use your product, but I have wasted HOURS of my time just trying to work around and report bugs. I still cannot deploy my first app. I've had it done for 3 weeks and haven't been able to deploy it to the app store.
I could understand if this were an open source project, and if the tool was a free tool. However, for a business license, your regular price is $1000 bucks. For that price, I would expect it to work and not to kill my productivity.
Please let me know when it is really stable. And please also consider that the 1 year license that I purchased should have its end date reset to 1 year from the time that Xamarin is a stable, usable product.
Is anybody else having this kind of frustration with Xamarin.ios?