NoesisGUI with Xamarin?
Posted: 29 Apr 2016, 16:08
Microsoft bought Xamarin and now bundles it free with Visual Studio. Xamarin allows us to develop cross-platform apps for Android, iOS, Windows, etc, in C#. I'm currently using Unity, but Xamarin may be better for normal apps (i.e. non-games), due to Unity's long startup delay and splash screen (and overkill 3-D engine).
Since NoesisGUI already supports all of these platforms, would it be a lot of work to integrate into a Xamarin project? Xamarin has a concept of a common code-base/resource project along with separate platform-specific projects. I'm guessing the Noesis plugins would go into these platform-specific projects, but the NoesisGUI documentation only covers integration using the native (Java, Objective-C, etc) languages.
I'm wondering if there could be a unified cross-platform interface, much like how the NoesisGUI Unity plugin works. Xamarin projects can have plugins in the form of NuGet packages or Visual Studio extensions. There is a Xamarin.Forms package that lets us create the UI using XAML. However, this XAML is different than Windows' XAML (e.g. different names for the UI controls), and there are no designer tools, such as Blend, that provide a WYSIWYG GUI.
If there was a NoesisGUI package for Xamarin, I would buy it right away. XAML is tedious to write by hand. There are a horde of other developers that have been begging Xamarin for a XAML designer tool for years. Even if Xamarin does create a XAML designer, it won't be as good as Blend and there is still the issue that the XAML is not compatible with the industry-standard Microsoft XAML, so Windows developers would not be able to re-use their existing styles, templates, user controls, code, etc.
Please consider writing a Xamarin plugin. Thanks for your consideration! btw, Xamarin uses C#, so this could be very similar to the way you made the Unity package.
Since NoesisGUI already supports all of these platforms, would it be a lot of work to integrate into a Xamarin project? Xamarin has a concept of a common code-base/resource project along with separate platform-specific projects. I'm guessing the Noesis plugins would go into these platform-specific projects, but the NoesisGUI documentation only covers integration using the native (Java, Objective-C, etc) languages.
I'm wondering if there could be a unified cross-platform interface, much like how the NoesisGUI Unity plugin works. Xamarin projects can have plugins in the form of NuGet packages or Visual Studio extensions. There is a Xamarin.Forms package that lets us create the UI using XAML. However, this XAML is different than Windows' XAML (e.g. different names for the UI controls), and there are no designer tools, such as Blend, that provide a WYSIWYG GUI.
If there was a NoesisGUI package for Xamarin, I would buy it right away. XAML is tedious to write by hand. There are a horde of other developers that have been begging Xamarin for a XAML designer tool for years. Even if Xamarin does create a XAML designer, it won't be as good as Blend and there is still the issue that the XAML is not compatible with the industry-standard Microsoft XAML, so Windows developers would not be able to re-use their existing styles, templates, user controls, code, etc.
Please consider writing a Xamarin plugin. Thanks for your consideration! btw, Xamarin uses C#, so this could be very similar to the way you made the Unity package.