Recent rumors of a Microsoft investment of an acquisition of Xamarin has our development staff giddy at the thought of creating native code for IOS and Android in the familiar IDE of Visual Studio.

We actually started our R&D into developing software for iPad with Xamarin’s predecessor Mono in late 2010. At that time, the code produced by the product was painfully slow on the device and once again we decided to dive into native development with Objective C. Before we could get really ramped up on Objective C, we found Rhodes Framework and began looking at taking an HTML 5 approach to smart phone development. While we were prototyping, Motorola Solutions purchased Rhodes and re-launched the product as RhoMobile Suite and from a business perspective, Rho became the easy choice for DCT Mobile.

Our experience with Rho has been largely positive. Motorola has done a nice job continuing to enhance and stabilize the platform. With the newer, more powerful rugged mobile devices running Windows embedded, the promise of cross platform development is becoming very real. Interesting enough, we have yet to deploy on an iOS device, so we really can’t comment on the Rho experience on that platform.

Despite our significant investment in Rho, the idea of Xamarin which supports to create native code rather HTML 5, utilizing C# in the Visual Studio environment is exciting. First of all, ramp up for new developers would be much shorter and native applications are always more responsive. Still with Microsoft’s mixed success in acquiring and integrating other companies it might be wise to watch what we wish for.

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