Submitted by Continuous gives you the power of a traditional desktop .NET IDE – full C# 6 and F# 4 language support with semantic highlighting and code completion – while also featuring live code execution so you don’t have to wait around for code to compile and run. Continuous works completely offline so you get super fast compiles and your code is secure.
Continuous gives you access to all of .NET’s standard library, F#’s core library, all of Xamarin’s iOS binding, and Xamarin.Forms. Access to all of these libraries means you won’t be constrained by Continuous – you can write code exactly as you’re used to.
It’s absolutely baffling neither Apple nor Microsoft made this application. While I doubt this will suddenly make tablet-doubters such as myself take tablets seriously as the future of computing, it’s exactly these kinds of applications that can really show what a platform is capable of. I’d love for applications like this to prove me wrong when it comes to the future of tablets.
Another app I must try! Too bad it’s mostly .net; I never was a huge fan of .net, though I do like the C# language.
I do wonder if Apple are beginning to go this way as well, what with Swift Playgrounds. It’s only a small start compared to this, but it may indicate something. Time will tell. I for one hope it does.
I know I’m speaking in unfair generalities, but it would seem the behemoths (looking at you, Apple and Micro$oft) are more into building walled gardens than boundary-crossing bridges. In fact, history shows that both are best suited to poaching ideas from actual innovators (looking at you, former Xerox PARC).
Why is Microsoft currently doing the opposite then?
Depends who you ask. To rational people, Microsoft appears to be undergoing significant shift in culture and business strategy, where they realize that embracing open source, and doing so honestly, is a good business strategy, which makes their products more accessible to newer developers, as well as increases mind share among geeks that run or will soon run IT departments.
Or, if you ask somebody that still spells it “Micro$oft”, it is one of three things:
1. Desperation
2. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
3. Paradoxical Undressing
1. and 2. don’t seem to apply (doesn’t stop people from claiming it, though), but somebody should take Satya Nadella’s temperature, just in case.
Yes, I still spell it “Micro$oft” out of habit. (How to detect someone who got into ‘free and open source software’ in the mid-90’s to early 2000’s…lol.)
Having said that, I do recognize that here is indeed a culture shift going on there now that the founders have moved on or gotten out of the way. On the other hand, I think there’s also a bit of flailing involved.
Embracing open source is only a good buisness strategy so long as you aren’t the market leader. Looking at the parts of microsoft that have gone open source it’s where they aren’t the market leader and are trying to get back into that position. See Apple for disturbing parallels. Apple were happy to be an open source embracing company when it suited them when their business was close to going under. Since the iPhone really took off around 2010-11 they haven’t done much in the open source land that wasn’t a project that was already open source, like Webkit or LLVM. In fact they have actively gone against open source and open standards in the last couple of years
Apple have try opened sourced swift.
Exactly.
Apple has certainly slowed down their rate of new open source software, but I think thats mainly a sign of the maturity of OSX
They’re doing both.
They’re taking the open market that is Windows Applications and pushing them into a Walled Garden that is the Windows App Store.
At the same time, they’re realizing they won’t survive without some kind of embrace of Open Source, so they’ve (a) made it easier to push Open Source software into the Windows App Store – namely to try to garner developers which hasn’t really worked – and (b) they have started working with and openly using more Open Source software – namely targetted at the Server Market as opposed to the Desktop market.
So if you’re operating a server, you’ll get better support for Open Source tech if you want to use Windows and Open Source together.
But if you’re operating a Desktop, then it’s not going to benefit you all that much.
The open source initiative at Microsoft has been going on for a while and started with a small team of devs releasing a few things as open source.
Yes it is true tooling wise they wouldn’t survive against node, so they have basically copied the tooling for the most part. ASP.NET MVC and Nuget is basically Ruby on Rails in .NET and Gems respectfully.
It’s far more than that. They’ve worked with Zend to do PHP optimization on IIS; worked with Mozilla to optimize Firefox on Windows; set the requirements for the Windows App Store to be friendly for open source licenses (supposedly); and more…
Yet, at the same time they continue to go after open source projects, users, vendors for patent infringement; only provided documentation for SaMBa when forced to by courts after an Antitrust ruling against them, and more.
The company is quite well split in two between those supporting open source and those against it. Slowly but surely those for open source are winning, but it’s a long process. Nadellya is promising in that he’s kind of part of those friendly to open source. Even still there remains a lot of “the left hand does not know what the right hand doeth”.
Yeh is has been going on for years. I’ve always said that in these large organisations most of the time the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.
Of course, hands are not intelligent beings 🙂
Quoting something out of context is not advisable. The context of the left and right hand was about not telling other people about your charitable deeds :-O
I’d be more impressed if I could do this (F#) on an Android device. Dev apps on Android are pretty much scripting toys at the moment.
AIDE is a toy? It’s a full blown compiler and will generate APK’s.
There’s no reason that this could not be done on Android. The component parts he used are all available as open source.
Microsoft are a weird combination of several different mentalities:
* This one, where by they release a full IDE for iOS, include a Linux layer in Windows, and do other cool things from a technical standpoint.
* Big Brother Bill (can’t help it, it’s got a ring to it) where by they want all your data and to tell you how your computer should be run.
* The confused bumbler, where by they really don’t understand their markets very well and continually misstep (Windows Mobile, Windows 8, Windows Phone, etc).
* The “me too!” phases, related to confused bumbling, when they wait years then do a rushed copy of whatever is in the market now because they don’t know what else to do.
It’s hard to know what to think of them on any given day. If they were a person rather than a company, I’d almost say they are suffering from a boarder-line personality. You sort of have to take Microsoft on a case by case basis these days.
Edited 2016-07-08 17:24 UTC
Xamarin apps run on Android too.
Doing development work on tiny touchscreen device with a slow CPU, no physical keyboard and no concept of a file system?
I find it baffling that this sounds appealing to some people.
Tiny is a matter of perspective, and just what is stopping you from connecting a keyboard of your choice? I do it all the time. Even the filesystem isn’t a problem, so long as the app itself can handle files and folders internally (many, many apps do just that) and can interact with version control and other servers.
The draw of these devices is simple: they’re small, get really good battery life (well, iPads do anyway), and can provide ideal on-the-go solutions with the right programs. To each their own, but I find my iPad invaluable for on the go work personally.