Gonna evangelize a little bit.
When Microsoft bought Xamarin, they did not underestimate the power of Xamarin.Forms for building cross platform UIs. Now with the release of Visual Studio for macOS and the Dotnet Core, its looks like its going to stay alive.
Development Environment
- macOS, XCode
- Android SDK
- Dotnet core
- Visual Studio for macOS
- nuget
Web ASP.NET Production Environment
- Digital Ocean
- Dotnet core on Docker
- Dokku, docker based heroku
Platforms Targeted in One Solution
- iOS
- Android
- Web ASP.NET
Benefits
- Build everything in one language
- Common code library
- Has Xamarin Forms for cross platform UI
- Mobile apps compile native (more on mobile)
- Reproducibility and deployability for webapps
Microsoft Friendliness
- Introducing Dotnet Core
- Microsoft Joins Linux Foundation and Welcomes Google to .NET Foundation
- Microsoft brings Ubuntu bash to Windows
More on using Xamarin for Mobile Solutions
- very fast release cycles that keep you up to date with mobile SDKs
- UI classes have direct mapping to native SDK classes
- If native libraries don’t already have a package in NuGet, a binding can be written to use them
- A test cloud is offered for enterprise testing
- Have the option/benefit of XAML layouts and data binding on mobile dev
- Certification is available!
Other Cross Platform Solutions
- Multi OS Engine for Java
- Flutter for Dart/JS
- Cordova for JS