Discussions

Actually the last one made me laugh out loud - I thought it was really funny!

Middle one was - blah.

12 minutes ago, spivonious wrote

@Ian2: I really can't see a market for a device like that. Too big for a phone, too small to be anything more than an e-reader.

I'd somewhat agree with you - but that's what the press said about the galaxy note and that ended up selling very well...

13 hours ago, fanbaby wrote

Were I a Microsoft suit, or even a simple developer, I'd be horrified at that picture (and of course that is the reason I posted it here, thank you, ), but as an outsider, it's 100% clear to me that all Microsoft fanboys should be yelling "GO OPEN SOURCE ON ALL THINGS THE SOONER THE BETTER OR EVERYTHING IS DOOMED"

I'll add that even open-sourcing dotnet might not help without a clear pledge with respect to patents.

I'm at this conference right now and yes, I have to admit that it's strange seeing all these c# developers using Macs all in the same room (and I'm included in that figure)! I think Microsoft would actually be quite glad actually as it means there's a market of mobile developers who actively prefer to use xamarin and C# instead of native objective C for iOS and Java for android - especially now that xamarin have their stuff working in Visual Studio. Plus a lot of these macs are also running windows on parallels or boot camp, so Microsoft got their sale on it.

It's actually a good conference, almost as much fun as Build!

4 hours ago, figuerres wrote

*snip*

if this is true or close to true: "Thurrott added even more to mull over. He said "Durango" is likely to be expensive -- $500 for the console itself and $300 for the annual Xbox Live subscription."

*snip*

 Not wishing to push this build thread offtopic too much, but the original article has a correction:

"Correction at 8:50 a.m. PT: $300 is the rumored price for a subscription-based Xbox"

@TexasToast:Google gets a lot of people going just for the freebies they give away - including a lot of hipster, non developers these days. Fortunately Build doesn't seem to suffer from that anywhere near as much (yet) - hopefully it never will.

For me at least the conference and sessions are the reason for going - the giveaways are nice, but not the reason I go..

Urgh - what an utter disaster the registration site was, but at least we finally managed to get registered. Why you can't have an 800 number for backup purposes is beyond me - I'd rather wait in a phone queue than sit on a broken website for 40 minutes not knowing if it's going to respond or not...

Anyway - the only way we were able to do so (like most of the twitterverse it seems!) was to skip the hotel booking step. Which leads to my question: what is the official Build Hotel and how much is the conference rate? Downtown San Francisco is expensive!

Looking forward to the Build conference, just frustrated at the registration 'lottery' - this ain't Google I/O! ;0)

53 minutes ago, felix9 wrote

File Save Dialog is in fact, a quite complex thing, its basically an Explorer, so it will load all your shell extensions, including those badly written, and I suppose it will try to enumerate system namespaces, and go to your last saved location, if your last saved location is something unreliable, like an offline network drive, I suppose some unexpected behavior can happen.

+1 on this response by Felix.

I used to have exactly the same behavior but with IE when my work computer was on Windows 7 - every time I tried to download a file it would completely lock up on the 'save as' dialog box. Turned out to be some network folder it was attempting to access but couldn't, yet didn't time out for some reason.
My guess is you are experiencing something similar...

It's pretty bad - worst thing is that apparently it has affected TFS online as that uses Azure at its backend. Fortunately for us, we're still in the 'R&D' process to TFS online and we're not yet live with anything that's critical, but that would have been bad if we were fully live and unable to do checkins or builds. I think someone at Microsoft is going to be in trouble for something so critical and stupidly missed...

Wasn't it Microsoft who quite a number years ago let one of their big domain names expire? If I remember it correctly I think it was hotmail.com or something. In the end a customer/developer re-registered it and pointed the DNS entries to the Microsoft server so it could be brought back up as it happened in the middle of the night and he couldn't get in touch with anyone at Microsoft. Might not have all those details right, but I seem to remember reading about it at the time.

Edit - yup, seems my memory is correct about this:
http://news.cnet.com/Good-Samaritan-squashes-Hotmail-lapse/2100-1023_3-234907.html

51 minutes ago, Harlequin wrote

By the sounds of it you still need a Mac to do builds. So, why not just develop on the Mac? Even if you didn't need a Mac to do builds, I'd prefer to put that $1,000 towards buying one.

Yup, that's a perfectly valid question and developing using Xamarin studio on the mac probably is the answer for many people.

For me in particular though, I have years and years of 'muscle memory' with Visual Studio and even though I have used Xamarin's UI (MonoDevelop for previous Monotouch versions and now Xamarin Studio) for over a year and am reasonably proficient with it, I'm still much faster inside Visual Studio/Windows environment. Just silly things like hitting F5 to debug instead of remembering to use Command + Enter.  Ctrl + C for copy, instead of Command + C etc. It just means you don't need to switch gears as much each time you switch platforms.

Plus, there's some things that Visual Studio just does better than the Mono UI (I'm not putting Mono down - it's a great product).
These things may sound silly, but they add up very quickly to being more productive - especially if like me, you develop for traditional Windows and for non Microsoft mobile apps, rather than concentrating on one or the other.

I'm of course coming at this from a company perspective, where $1,000 isn't a number that is a showstopper. If I were doing this as a hobby or as a small independent developer shop, then I would probably go for the cheaper, non visual studio approach.

I'm just installing the bits now and in my case, I'm going to run it all on the mac, rather than have a separate mac and pc setup. I run Windows 8 using parallels and so using Visual studio inside there is apparently supported. I'll let you know how it goes!

More details on the Visual Studio integration are here:

http://docs.xamarin.com/guides/ios/getting_started/installation/windows

Basically, you still need a networked mac to use as a build machine. Also have to use Interface Builder on the mac to design XIB UI files - that's a great shame and hopefully the smart folks at Xamarin will figure that out eventually. I would LOVE to get rid of that step - everytime I fire up XCode/Interface builder, I want to throw my mac through the window...!