So about a year ago I gave Xamarin a try. The idea of leveraging my 12 years of experience in .NET and Visual Studio to build mobile applications appealed to me. After playing around with the trial I soon discovered that the experience wasn't going to be smooth; Deploying to the mac build host was slow and worked about half the time. I remember getting weird error messages that really didn't mean anything. Most of the time, the solution was to restart Visual Studio or the build host. My feeling at the time and from my conversations on the forums was that this was not a development environment you could use every day and be productive with.
So today, almost 1 year later, I thought I'd give Xamarin another try. So I went to the website and donwloaded the installer and started it with the default options. Half-way through the installation it popped an error saying it couldn't find an Android SDK (wasn't it installing it?). Had to restart the installation. On the 2nd try it completed successfully.
Excited to try my first iOS application, I create an empty solution and add a new iOS project through Add New Project and selecting iOS Hello World Application. After clicking OK, a VS prompt asks me if I want to reload the project I'm just about to add. Strange. The prompt appears on top of what looks like a Xamarin window asking to login to my account. So I click reload and bam Visual Studio crashes...
I remember listening to a talk by Miguel who tells developers how he wants to delight them. This is far from a pleasant experience so far and I haven't even started programming yet. My question is this: how can a developer be "delighted" when the path to creating a simple Hello World application is so bumpy? Is the development experience in Visual Studio better today than it was a year ago? At a thousand dollar per targeted platform per developer per year, I'm kinda wondering where all this money goes...
Guy