j-phenow

Hey! Quick back story; my brother helped me assimilate into Minneapolis a little over 4 years ago and we saw you at Cause (playing a benefit show for a local producer who got hit on his bike IIRC?). I've been a fan and resident ever since. I try to get to as many shows as I can and love seeing what you're doing with other locals, branching out, playing Target (and other awesome appearances like your sneaky Eaux Claires appearance) - awesome stuff man!! Well done.

Anyways, couple questions:

• What's your favorite town to play?
• Who is your favorite to collaborate with?
• Will we see more of the live band on this tour?
• What did you end up getting tattooed today?
• Favorite tattoo shop in Minneapolis/worldwide?
• When will you appear on Always Sunny in Philadelphia? ;)

+1 Four Fists

First of all - well done. I had used .NET a little, years ago, as a requirement during an internship I had. A little over a year ago we were looking into how to provide Android+iOS apps in lockstep release. Xamarin quickly became a clear choice due to maturity, tooling, support, among other things. After a little over a year tinkering on Xamarin I’ve gone from not caring about .NET to wanting to use it as much as possible. Your work played a big part in that, and you should be proud as hell.

Oh yea questions

1. Where do you see mobile software headed over the next few years? More Xamarin or the like? Different paradigms? Something different entirely?
2. What’s a key thing missing in Xamarin today?
3. Where do you see .NET Core fitting into the world? Does it generally work to break into the hearts and minds of people like me who used to be wildly anti-Microsoft? Does it try to take on the rising love of Go?
4. What’s a key thing missing in Core today?
5. What’s your favorite thing about what you do?

I have way more but to avoid piling on, I’ll save fire another time 😁 thanks for doing an AMA!

I’m in no way part of the team, so I can’t answer for anyone but myself, but I’ve thought a lot about this, having been doing some Xamarin for a bit. It seems to me that this is less a problem with Xamarin and more of a problem with needing to grok 2 to 4 system designs all at once. I use a fair bit of Forms, you have to consider the Xamarin world, then there’s one consideration for each platform. Don’t get me started on multi-device formats.

That’s all to say that I think the difficulty lies in the problem set that’s being solved. It’s just flat-out hard to both receive the control that native gives you and a simple developer experience. Xamarin could do a little more on Forms I think to create good, cross-platform experiences, but inevitably something will be amiss and you’ll want to drop to native. Dropping to native means the now I’m required to multiple contexts and constraints.

It’s just hard. I’d be interested to hear how they’d try to improve the state of things though, great question

Thanks for taking the time to answer! Hope the release and the tour go well!