Working on a cross platform mobile app for work. We've decided to use Xamarin.Forms. Anyone else using this?

We recently did a bakeoff between it and React Native. There are some cool things about it (native UI, ease of integrating with our existing CI/build chain, F# support, etc.), but we went with React for a few more reasons. I don't think it's "there" yet in terms of F#, but will be in a few months' time probably. Also, Xamarin Studio is nice, except we can't use it because we're a corp (but Mono made that potential pain point null).

@telegraphscope interesting info. I really want to get into React Native.

@dfox so far we really like it. We weighted our "interest in using it" pretty heavily. But it has all (or close to all) the native things you'd need, and they're just an `npm install` away. Plus, we have a website written in React already, so we can share code with it. We also really like the debugging and the live reload—not having to wait for stuff to compile is a big plus. The flip side of that is not having a compiler to catch syntax errors, etc, but eh.

@dfox As far as I can tell, Product Hunt is using React Native. And look at how crappy it is. On iOS, some buttons need three to four taps to respond, horizontal scrolling is just weird and clunky (also overused, rendering the amazingly useful slide-to-go-back feature useless) and try turning airplane mode on while using the app to see how elegantly it handles no internet connectivity.

@holdsie I recently took over a project that uses Xamarin.Forms. Its a great platform if you build it correct because it can easily get a bloated. It's also WAY more efficent to develop on a Mac for compiling reasons

@nwestfall I'm currently using windows with visual studio, and using a mac on the same network to build and compile to emulators / phones. Although, having to use my personal mac as we're only in a concept phase so no fancy expensive macs being bought (which is fair enough until we provide something worth the investment!)

@holdsie thats how I use it for personal projects just because my wife is the one with the mac. If you have any questions let me know! The C# part is easy, understanding certain elements and how they work in apple/android in forms can sometimes be tricky to find

Thanks @nwestfall :) really appreciate that!

@Holdsie why does the visual studio emulator take ages to to load. I am trying the simple click me program and the emulator has taken over an hour to show up. will this have to be done Everytime I compile?