I remember the general consensus amonst C# developers that have used Xamarin is that it is sooo bad and sooo Awful. This was 3 years ago.
I don’t know why they say so. I just stayed away because of this.
It this still the case as of 2020/2021?
I would like to start using Xamarin as I do WPF quite a lot. So I’ very familiar with Xaml.
Xamarin forms sucks. Xamarin mobile is ok. But it’s all getting phased out for MAUI
MAUI is basically Xamarin though. It’s not a new framework, just a big update and a name change.
MAUI
Oh there is a difference between forms and mobile? Didn’t know that
Xamarin mobile is ok.
Well, you still have to deal with the flaky tooling.
Honestly, no. The developer experience has improved in leaps and bounds. There are alternatives, but I love Xamarin.Forms because I can leverage existing skills and go Native if I need to. This link speaks volumes imho https://dotnet.microsoft.com/apps/xamarin/customers
Xamarin is easy to get your app running if you have experience with WPF. Just keep in mind that there are subtle but noteworthy differences (like having both Label and TextBlock in WPF but only Label in Xamarin, which has its own set of properties). Also, whenever you want to create custom functionality or diverge from the default set of elements, you will quickly learn how hard it is to implement custom renderers or how to implement platform specific code.
In short: it’s okay if your app is small and you already got experience in WPF. Otherwise spend your time getting to know the alternatives: <React/Vue> Native, Flutter, Qt. Personally, I’d either go with a JS Framework, because I’ve got experience with Vue already.
C# devs
null reference exceptions
