Visual Studio Code vs Xamarin

Overview

Xamarin

Stacks1.3K

Followers1.5K

Votes785

Visual Studio Code

Stacks186.5K

Followers169.1K

Votes2.3K

GitHub Stars178.2K

Forks35.9K

Visual Studio Code vs Xamarin: What are the differences?

Visual Studio Code (VS Code) and Xamarin are two popular tools used in different aspects of software development. Here are the key differences between Visual Studio Code and Xamarin:

Purpose and Scope: Visual Studio Code is a lightweight source code editor that supports multiple programming languages and is primarily used for writing, editing, and debugging code. On the other hand, Xamarin is a framework for building cross-platform mobile applications using C# and .NET. It allows developers to write code that can be used across different mobile platforms, such as iOS, Android, and Windows, while still providing access to platform-specific APIs and features.
Development Environment: Visual Studio Code provides a flexible and customizable development environment suitable for a wide range of projects. It allows developers to add extensions for specific languages, frameworks, and tools. VS Code is often preferred for web development, scripting, and general-purpose coding. In contrast, Xamarin requires a more specialized development environment. It is typically used with Visual Studio, a full-featured integrated development environment (IDE), which provides comprehensive tools and features specific to Xamarin development.
Target Platforms: Visual Studio Code is a flexible editor that can be used to create applications for web, desktop, and cloud platforms. It offers support for multiple programming languages and frameworks, making it suitable for various project types. On the other hand, Xamarin is primarily focused on mobile application development. It enables developers to create native or cross-platform mobile apps that can run on iOS and Android devices, leveraging a shared codebase for efficient development.
Language and Technology Stack: Visual Studio Code supports multiple programming languages, including JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Java, and more. It provides excellent support for web technologies and offers extensive tooling and debugging capabilities for web development. In contrast, Xamarin uses C# and .NET as the primary programming language and technology stack. It provides a rich set of libraries and frameworks specifically tailored for mobile app development.
Community: Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is a widely adopted, user-friendly editor with strong community support. It offers a vast ecosystem of extensions and resources. Xamarin requires familiarity with C# or .NET and provides dedicated documentation, forums, and tutorials for mobile app development.

In summary, Visual Studio Code is a versatile code editor suitable for various projects and programming languages, while Xamarin is a framework specialized in cross-platform mobile app development using C# and .NET.

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Advice on Xamarin, Visual Studio Code

Kamaleshwar

Software Engineer at Dibiz Pte. Ltd.

Jul 8, 2020

Decided

Visual Studio Code became famous over the past 3+ years I believe. The clean UI, easy to use UX and the plethora of integrations made it a very easy decision for us. Our gripe with Sublime was probably only the UX side. VSCode has not failed us till now, and still is able to support our development env without any significant effort.

Goland being paid, as well as built only for Go seemed like a significant limitation to not consider it.

1.36M views1.36M

Comments

Simon

Student at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

Jan 9, 2020

Decided

I decided to choose VSCode over Sublime text for my Systems Programming class in C. What I love about VSCode is its awesome ability to add extensions. Intellisense is a beautiful debugger, and Remote SSH allows me to login and make real-time changes in VSCode to files on my university server. This is an awesome alternative to going back and forth on pushing/pulling code and logging into servers in the terminal. Great choice for anyone interested in C programming!

1.29M views1.29M

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Xamarin	Visual Studio Code
Xamarin’s Mono-based products enable .NET developers to use their existing code, libraries and tools (including Visual Studio*), as well as skills in .NET and the C# programming language, to create mobile applications for the industry’s most widely-used mobile devices, including Android-based smartphones and tablets, iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.	Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.
Cross-platform development- Thinking about supporting iOS, Android, Mac and Windows? Xamarin allows you to write it all in C#.;Reuse existing code- Use your favorite .NET libraries in Xamarin apps. Easily use third-party native libraries and frameworks.; Discover as you type- Explore APIs as you type with code autocompletion.;Visual Studio or Xamarin Studio- Create, build, debug, and deploy apps in Visual Studio. Or use Xamarin Studio, a fully-featured IDE that is built for mobile app development.;Native UI, Native Performance- Xamarin delivers high performance compiled code with full access to all the native APIs so you can create native apps with device-specific experiences.; Point and Click UI Design- Xamarin provides a world class Android UI designer. Use Apple Xcode UI designer to create interfaces and Storyboards that automatically sync with your Xamarin.iOS project.	Combines UI of a modern editor with code assistance and navigation; Integrated debugging experience
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 178.2K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 35.9K
Stacks 1.3K	Stacks 186.5K
Followers 1.5K	Followers 169.1K
Votes 785	Votes 2.3K
Pros & Cons
Pros 121 Power of c# on mobile devices 81 Native performance 79 Native apps with native ui controls 73 No javascript - truely compiled code 67 Sharing more than 90% of code over all platforms Cons 9 Build times 5 Visual Studio 4 Price 3 Scalability 3 Complexity	Pros 341 Powerful multilanguage IDE 310 Fast 194 Front-end develop out of the box 158 Support TypeScript IntelliSense 142 Very basic but free Cons 46 Slow startup 29 Resource hog at times 20 Poor refactoring 14 Poor UI Designer 11 Weak Ui design tools

What are some alternatives to Xamarin, Visual Studio Code?

Sublime Text

Sublime Text is available for OS X, Windows and Linux. One license is all you need to use Sublime Text on every computer you own, no matter what operating system it uses. Sublime Text uses a custom UI toolkit, optimized for speed and beauty, while taking advantage of native functionality on each platform.

Atom

At GitHub, we're building the text editor we've always wanted. A tool you can customize to do anything, but also use productively on the first day without ever touching a config file. Atom is modern, approachable, and hackable to the core. We can't wait to see what you build with it.

Vim

Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set. Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. Vim is distributed free as charityware.

Ionic

Free and open source, Ionic offers a library of mobile and desktop-optimized HTML, CSS and JS components for building highly interactive apps. Use with Angular, React, Vue, or plain JavaScript.

Flutter

Flutter is a mobile app SDK to help developers and designers build modern mobile apps for iOS and Android.

React Native

React Native enables you to build world-class application experiences on native platforms using a consistent developer experience based on JavaScript and React. The focus of React Native is on developer efficiency across all the platforms you care about - learn once, write anywhere. Facebook uses React Native in multiple production apps and will continue investing in React Native.

NativeScript

NativeScript enables developers to build native apps for iOS, Android and Windows Universal while sharing the application code across the platforms. When building the application UI, developers use our libraries, which abstract the differences between the native platforms.

Notepad++

Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.

Emacs

GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing.

Apache Cordova

Apache Cordova is a set of device APIs that allow a mobile app developer to access native device function such as the camera or accelerometer from JavaScript. Combined with a UI framework such as jQuery Mobile or Dojo Mobile or Sencha Touch, this allows a smartphone app to be developed with just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Related Comparisons

Purpose and Scope: Visual Studio Code is a lightweight source code editor that supports multiple programming languages and is primarily used for writing, editing, and debugging code. On the other hand, Xamarin is a framework for building cross-platform mobile applications using C# and .NET. It allows developers to write code that can be used across different mobile platforms, such as iOS, Android, and Windows, while still providing access to platform-specific APIs and features.
Development Environment: Visual Studio Code provides a flexible and customizable development environment suitable for a wide range of projects. It allows developers to add extensions for specific languages, frameworks, and tools. VS Code is often preferred for web development, scripting, and general-purpose coding. In contrast, Xamarin requires a more specialized development environment. It is typically used with Visual Studio, a full-featured integrated development environment (IDE), which provides comprehensive tools and features specific to Xamarin development.
Target Platforms: Visual Studio Code is a flexible editor that can be used to create applications for web, desktop, and cloud platforms. It offers support for multiple programming languages and frameworks, making it suitable for various project types. On the other hand, Xamarin is primarily focused on mobile application development. It enables developers to create native or cross-platform mobile apps that can run on iOS and Android devices, leveraging a shared codebase for efficient development.
Language and Technology Stack: Visual Studio Code supports multiple programming languages, including JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Java, and more. It provides excellent support for web technologies and offers extensive tooling and debugging capabilities for web development. In contrast, Xamarin uses C# and .NET as the primary programming language and technology stack. It provides a rich set of libraries and frameworks specifically tailored for mobile app development.
Community: Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is a widely adopted, user-friendly editor with strong community support. It offers a vast ecosystem of extensions and resources. Xamarin requires familiarity with C# or .NET and provides dedicated documentation, forums, and tutorials for mobile app development.

Visual Studio Code vs Xamarin