Xamarin Joy Factory

Setting up a new company consumes a lot of time. Specially as we are developing as fast as we can not one, but two products: .NET for iPhone and .NET for Android.

Structurally, we are better off than we were the first time that we built these products. We have more developers working on each product than we did the first time around, so progress is faster. But we also had to swap the developers around: those that wrote Foo, can not work on Foo again. This is just one of the things that we have to do to ensure a clean room implementation.

Our vision is to create happy developers. We did that in the past by bringing the C# language, garbage collection, LINQ, strongly typed APIs, Parallel FX, intellisense and inline documentation to iPhone and Android developers. And by making it possible for the world's 6 million .NET developers to reuse their skills on the most popular mobile platforms.

This time around, we are doing even more. We are addressing many of the frustrations that developers had with the old products and making sure that those frustrations go away.

Nat and myself complement each other very well here. This means that there are a lot of new things that will be present in our offering that we never did in the past.

There is a new level of polish that those familiar with Nat's previous products had (SUSE Studio, NLD/SLED, Ximian Desktop). Everyone at Xamarin can feel that Nat is hard at work when they noticed that one of the first things Nat did was to engage six design firms and an army of technical writers to ensure that our products go from "Nice" to "Amazing". And that was on his second week as CEO, a lot has happened since.

I do not want to give away everything that we are doing, it would ruin the surprise, but we are here to deliver joy to programmers everywhere.

If you are interested in working with us, and making mobile development and .NET development a joy that everyone can enjoy, check out our Jobs page

Where we are now

It gives me great pleasure to say that we have elevated the discourse on the iPhone simulator and my Chicken-powered TweetStation is up and running with the new iOS product. The picture on the left is TweetStation powered by MonoTouch, the picture on the right is TweetStation powered by Xamarin's iPhone product:

TweetStation on MonoTouch
TweetStation on Xamarin iOS

Update: TweetStation now starts up on Device! We have the static compiler working!

We also have the delicious iOS5 APIs exposed as strongly-typed and intellisense-friendly C#. We are now updating the APIs from Beta1 to Beta2, which should be completed today or tomorrow.

Our Android efforts are moving fast. Only this morning we got Layouts to render on the device. This is a lot of work, as it gets Dalvik to start Mono, and initializes our entire bridge and exercises the C# and Java bridge. In addition, we have identified and fixed a serious problem in the distributed garbage collector.

We also have a number of surprises for everyone in MonoDevelop, we believe that you guys are going to love the new features for iPhone and Android development.

There is still a lot of polish left to do. We are working as hard as we can to have Preview releases in your hands, but we feel confident that we will have a great product for sale by the end of the summer. We hope you will all max out your credit cards buying it.