GerbilSoft, on 05 December 2014 - 02:12 PM, said:
I don't mean cross-platform in the sense that "you can write programs for any platform". I mean in the sense that you can have a project with a common framework and platform-specific components on top of that. (.NET doesn't count; while they are open-sourcing the core platform, Windows Forms is still proprietary, and Mono doesn't cut it.)
As far as I know, Visual Studio doesn't let you do that. You have to make completely separate projects for each platform. (This means entirely separate platforms, not just CPUs; 32-bit vs 64-bit Windows doesn't require separate projects, but desktop Windows vs. Metro vs. Mac vs. Linux etc does.)
It's a sort of there for mobile but not quite. Microsoft has been pushing Xamarin's shit for iOS and Android development, where for the "low" price of $300 a year you have access to Xamarin.Forms which allows you to build one UI that tries to use native controls on each platform where possible. It works across iOS, Android and Windows Phone. For that case, it really is the same code for all platforms, just not the same binary.
I'm kind of biased against Xamarin though, because they basically took what used to be freely available for noncommercial development and paywalled it. I've used MonoMac for Mac ports of some open source stuff to provide native UI's, and a year or so back they decided to cut off development of that and try and force everyone over to their paid version of it. They took away the ability to generate "Bundled" versions of apps that would automatically strip down and include relevant portions of Mono inside an app so the entire Mono Runtime wouldn't need to be installed on a client to run the app, and forced you to use Xamarin.Mac for it. Likewise, the actual API support for MonoMac is practically frozen, leaving OSS developers forced to use derecated API's (like beginSheet at the application level which was deprecated in 10.9 instead of at the window level like it is now) just to do native development in C#. I don't have issues with them charging money to companies and people who sell products made with their toolkits, that makes sense, but I'm upset because they basically cut off those of us who develop free and/or open source stuff and want money for something that used to be free. Even Microsoft offers practically the full Visual Studio suite for non-commercical purposes for free now with the new community edition that they released recently.
This was a pretty big diversion from the discussion at hand, so...I'm glad to see they're at least porting mobile exclusive stuff to Windows Store. It means that perhaps they'd be open to doing this for other games if it goes well, like the ones from last year that everyone wants to see on more platforms?
This post has been edited by sonicblur: 05 December 2014 - 06:32 PM
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