I woke up one day, surfed the web and something was different, I didn't know what, my I could feel it in my bones. Back then I used to crawl the MVA in pursuit for web and C# skills, come ALM would also be welcome. After some time, I started to see Python courses, Angular, MongoDb, PHP, Django, Node.. and I thought to myself.. "hold down your horses", this is it.. Microsoft was changing, for the better I may say. Check out for courses in this or other topics or by Christopher Harrison, Susan Ibach, Stacey Mulcahy, Rami (awesome) Sayar, and so many others that I can't remember all. And this is not only about training, this people love what they do, and it's awesome to learn with them, I have first of all a great time watching this tutorials, check them out.
Microsoft was embracing all this new cool things, and as they say, all that "the cool kids are doing" and, I could be now one of those cool kids.. well, maybe I'm not a kid anymore but hey, the planet is older than I am. So, it all started smoothly, a bit of a language here, some support there, Azure started to support everything, OSs, Languages, Wow!
Back in the day.. I was developing an Android app and I needed some power, and I bought my first Mac, well, a couple years ago... and I was kind of stuck in the middle of two worlds. I mean, I work mostly on C# but I like to explore those things that "the cool kids are doing", and I had to use a windows machine to do .net development and Used the mac for other projects. This was hard for many reasons, but the worst is that, I can't adapt to any keyboard, CTRL, Command, meh, I'm always switching from work pc to my macbook, I can't even count the times I mess up with everything I'm doing because I try to Command + C on my pc and I CTRL + C on my mac, curly braces.. If you face this, you know that I'm trying to say.
A couple of days ago, I was doing some Katas on CodeWars (if you don't know it, go check I'll wait here for you) and I felt the need to play a bit with the code on my IDE, but.. I was on my mac.
I could spin up my Windows 10 VM, but I knew that, Microsoft was different so I searched a bit for a solution.
I knew Xamarin for some time, and when I think about Xamarin I think about Mobile development, but then, I remembered that the mobile development is .net so.. I opened my Xamarin Studio and (I feel silly about this) and there it was, as a shining light at the end of the tunnel.
Xamarin is not Visual Studio (Yet) but It's pretty close.
I was amazed, I could do almost everything I do with VS, I use also VS Code.. (ok you can say, I'm an addict), so I've started a couple of solutions to play a bit with this Katas, and it was a great experience. Almost all the sugar that you're used to, it's there, Intellisense, NUnit, and even NuGet joined the party and the best of all, this is rocket fast!
The look and feel is a bit different, and I've tried to make it the most like my Visual Studio definitions I could, it's not quite there but is close enough.
You can create new Solutions in C#, F#, VB.NET and IL, NUnit Library Projects, ASP.NET using C#, and MonoMac. And if you're interested, using the Visual Studio Dev Essentials, you can also use the Xamarin University Mobile Training Benefit and learn more about what you can do with Xamarin.
I'll be playing a little more with Xamarin for my solutions and maybe one day, I can spend all the time coding on my mac, or maybe if Santa's drop a Surface Book Pro on my lap I can think about change, but for now, this is awesome!
Know more about Xamarin @ home site.
Have you tried? Do you use it in production? Tell me what's your experience or how did your experience go.
Stay Tuned for More
Cheers,
Ricardo Melo Joia