MicroStrategy Mobile vs. Xamarin

One of best business intelligence enterprise reporting tools, it has loads of rich features available to the business user with ease of use and advanced analysis in a single end-to-end solution. I like MicroStrategy's simplicity in creating complex multi-pass SQL reports, visualizations over varied data sets, and the breath of areas in which the product can be used. I like mostly everything. I think there are some remaining improvements that could be done in the area of data visualization.

Incentivized

Xamarin is well suited for several reasons. The first, it allows companies to share code across platforms. If the app has a lot of business logic and a fairly simple UI, Xamarin is great for this use case. Xamarin also works well if the developers who will work on the app are already fluent in .NET. Xamarin is less appropriate if the company has a lot of developers. If there are plenty of resources to develop apps natively then the headache of dealing with Xamarin's issues are not worth the effort. If the UI is very complex and has difficult animations it's difficult to debug visual/performance issues in Xamarin.

Incentivized

• Flexibility.
• Excellent visualization.
• High definition graphics which are readable for any user.

Incentivized

• We save development time with Xamarin, because we use Xamarin Forms an so we can share most of the code over 3 platforms.
• We can use our C# knowledge to develop iOS and Android Apps.
• Xamarin's integration into Visual Studio is very good and became even better during the last releases of Visual Studio.

Incentivized

• More documentation of communication between the layers of the infrastructure so security discussions can better be facilitated.
• Reloading the data when you reboot the server takes time depending on the infrastructure.
• It can also be a bit slow due to the amount of data we have, but that's more of a data problem.
• I have not been able to figure out how I can control table joins within reports, so I have to create free form SQL reports, which is messy to upkeep.

Incentivized

• Having also done a lot of native mobile development, some of the IDE's features need to emulator their native counterparts. For example, trying to extract a string resource on Android in Xamarin Studio is painful. There are many useful tools in Android Studio that Xamarin should implement.
• Xamarin will always be behind on native platform features. They must catch up when Apple and Google release new platform versions.
• The biggest pain point is the random issues Xamarin continues to have. Having a large code base on top of a native platform makes it very difficult to debug issues. Every developer must decide if its an issue with Xamarin or the native platform. Bugs don't get fixed very quickly. Hopefully that will change with the Microsoft acquisition.

Incentivized

Xamarin has been great for developing different projects efficiently and effectively. It's nice to reuse the core business logic across different platforms so that there are less to maintain and little replications are needed. The biggest benefit is that C# programmers do not have to learn a different language to do mobile development.

Incentivized

If you are required to develop applications that are cross-platformed, Xamarin is a great tool to use. It will help save time and efforts from your development team to be able to build applications seamlessly for android, IOS, windows, and web on a single platform instead of requiring multiple tools to get the job done

Incentivized

I never had to contact support for any help. Most of the problems we ran into, we were able to identify and use peer support through blogs and other internet sources to resolve the problems. There are plenty of sources online which provide tutorials, discuss problems, etc. Example: StackOverflow

Incentivized

Just with any programming tasks, have a plan first. Design out the system, spend time to build it correctly the first time and have plenty of testing and user acceptance opportunities. Xamarin was easy to implement for a C# programmer. However, you need to do tutorials to realize the platform's capabilities.

Incentivized

MicroStrategy is much better.

Incentivized

Xamarin runs natively on MacOS, and the debugger and other integration and auto-complete tools are far better than Eclipse for C# .NET. It also carries much of the plugin/add-on capabilities that are so desirable on Atom. Eclipse is a better for generalized software development, provided a developer is comfortable switching between the IDE the command line for certain parts of their workflow, like building, package management, or debugging. But for C# .NET development on MacOS specifically, Xamarin is the best product I've used for the job.

Incentivized

• Code Sharing - We were able to launch an Android implementation of our app within weeks after finishing iOS. The amount of time taken to develop a new platform is very small.
• Monetization - not the best, but definitely getting better. We've had issues with finding suitable ad networks that work with Xamarin.

Incentivized