There’s an entire porting layer in the middle (mono) and C# is a tokenized language. The downside to Xamarin/C# is application size and speed. I’ve written an entire Bluetooth application that has very little os-specific code and seems to work flawlessly in Android, iOS and Windows.

Now that Xamarin is owned and supported by Microsoft (and open-source) it seems usable. It was too buggy, missing too much functionality, or created way-too-slow an application. In the past I’ve tried Xamarin/C# and ended up using native languages.

Showing all three implementations with a UWP (universal windows platform) code sample. C# is the language of choice for Windows and Xamarin is Microsoft’s os-portable layer for using C# with Linux and iOS. If every other language calls it a lambda why call it a closure? Because you’re Apple I guess - but it’s murder on those of us who spend most of our time in embedded C++ or Python or in Windows.Īfter torturing myself for a while I decided to once again try Xamarin/C#. A line from Wikipedia -> “ Swift supports closures (known as lambdas in other languages)”. It wouldn’t be so bad but they consistently ignore industry or common standards to go their own way. After spending about a month going through samples and learning Swift (the native language for iOS) all I could think was “who the wants to write anything in Swift”? Just what we need is an entire language that is only supported by Apple. I just spent about 3 months writing a native (Java) Android application and then started on the iPhone/iOS version. This is about Xamarin/C# but let me begin by describing why. How to Develop Portable Applications (iPhone and Android)

Portable application