Ximian is Dead, Long Live Xamarin

May 16, 2011 2 Comments

I was depressed when I heard that Attachmate disbanded the Mono team as a part of it’s acquisition of Novell but Miguel de Icaza has a lot of chutzpa. He has reformed his team in nothing flat and launched a new company to continue the development of Mono and its associated C#-based mobile toolkits, MonoToch (iOS) and  MonoDriod (Android) and Moonlight (Silverlight for Linux).

To make a long story short, the plan to spin off was not executed. Instead on Monday May 2nd, the Canadian and American teams were laid off; Europe, Brazil and Japan followed a few days later. These layoffs included all the MonoTouch and MonoDroid engineers and other key Mono developers. Although Attachmate allowed us to go home that day, we opted to provide technical support to our users until our last day at Novell, which was Friday last week.

…

Now, two weeks later, we have a plan in place, which includes both angel funding for keeping the team together, as well as a couple of engineering contracts that will help us stay together as a team while we ship our revenue generating products.

~Miguel de Icaza

All the best Miguel.

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C# as Universal Smart Phone Programming Language?

February 24, 2010 Leave a comment

We started thinking about building a smart phone app to interface to PeopleMatrix. The obvious devices to support are BlackBerry, iPhone, Android and Windows Mobile. There is also Symbian but those devices are unusual in our primary market. Each one of these platforms has a totally different programming model:

  • BlackBerry –> Java ME + RIM libraries
  • iPhone –> Objective-C
  • Android –> Subset of Java 5 + Apache commons and  Android libraries
  • Windows Mobile –> C/C++ and .NET CF
  • Symbian –> Weird non-standard Symbian C++ variant and Qt

I just can’t envision anyone using their smartphone to interact with a sophisticated app on a screen the size or a postage stamp. That eliminates Blackberry and (many) Windows Mobile devices. Also, you have to prioritize developing for the device platforms that are growing. That means iPhone and Andoid. iPhone is very popular and Android has shown amazing growth.

The problem is that the development environment is totally different so that porting applications between Android and iPhone is a complete re-write. One ray of hope for leveraging code across these platforms is the Mono project. Novell is currently shipping a product called MonoTouch which compiles C# code into native binaries for the iPhone. The Mono guys also have Mono working on Android with proxy classes that call into the Android libraries. (In early testing Mono appears to out-perform Dalvik, too.)

If Mono on Android gets polished up like MonoTouch, that would make C# a first class programming language for a huge swath of the most exciting devices. The largest challenge for managing the codebase of an app is that it is very likely that each platform would require care to abstract access to platform-native APIs which would certainly include the GUI and other hardware interfaces.

Even so, I am watching Mono closely. Interesting times.

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