How serious treat Microsoft this project?

[volkrass]

Open speaking here. If I compare this project with other open source initiatives in speed of improvements , reactions on issues and adoption of open pull-requests, I don't feel me comfortable. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate what the Microsoft guys have achieved. Especially the Clang/Objective-C integration in Visual Studio is impressive, but for us is crucial to understand if it makes sense to invest in this approach to port our customer apps to Windows 10 or if we have to go a different way. Especially under the impression that a lot of APIs of the iOS Framework are still missing.

[ash-rain]

My guess is: dead serious :laughing: Sorry I just had to...

[s5msft]

@volkrass This is a great question. The core WinObjC team is smaller than I think many people suspect so some fixes/updates take a bit longer than might be expected, but we are working hard on everything.

Having said that, we are growing the dev team pretty aggressively. So, in a few weeks, you should start to see almost all aspects of the project start to move forward more quickly.

[Alx06]

Thanks for this answer @s5msft and thans for this quesiton @volkrass !!! I'm also really interested by this project (I've a lot of iOS apps to port) but there are 2 little remaining bugs (eg. popViewController doesn't work) that prevent me to finish. And I was wondering if there was a dedicated team in M$ for that or not. Now, I know. There is such a team, but a little one.

Hope you'll hire quickly some devs. Where could we apply? :)

[volkrass]

@s5msft Thanks a lot for your fair answer. I'm pretty sure Microsoft have the resources & money for an adequate staffing. Looking forward to see your progress in next few weeks. This project would be very helpful for us.

[LeoNatan]

@s5msft I am sorry, but what was promised in the project Islandwood session video and what was finally presented are two completely different things. The project is in a pitiful state, with a quasy archaic iOS 6 level API, and even as that, so much of it is implemented as stubs or, worse, in a very naive and incorrect manner. This project is at least two years away from being able to call it remotely ready, by which time it would be five years of API behind the times. Especially in UIKit and networking, there has been so much advancement in the API, with a lot of the older API being deprecated for good reason. It seems to me a shame to set such an old baseline as your goal, when a lot of that would no longer be used in modern iOS projects.

I am sorry, but to me this project seems like a PR stunt by Microsoft. It is not taken seriously. You cannot have such an undertaking with "smaller than I think many people suspect" team and expect to be taken seriously. At least with the Android port, you had some baseline of implementation. Here the state of affairs is sad.

[ash-rain]

@LeoNatan I think this is part of the point of the project being open-source.

[LeoNatan]

@ash-rain What is that? Letting the community sort it out by themselves? I think you are missing the point of the project. It was supposed to let iOS software developers take an existing project and, with minimal effort, port it to Windows Mobile, which is in dire need of software. But the Windows Mobile market is still miniscule. So what incentive do people have to help with this project? Academic or fun? Sure, I'll grant you that. But how many are there that know iOS and Windows development well enough to be able to or willing to properly support a project like this? If Microsoft was serious about it, it should have allocated adequate resources to move it forward properly.

[ash-rain]

@LeoNatan I get your point. It's neither black nor white. I think it's an effort from Microsoft to contribute to open-source software and save some money while doing so. I respect that as both developer enthusiast and a guy that makes money with coding. I'm not defending anyone, I also think Microsoft should put some more manpower into this but I also admire what the guys have done so far. I take this opportunity to learn more about iOS and contribute to the project. You don't have to do it but you should put more effort into understanding the open-source status of the project and mostly why it is the way it is, if you intend to rely on it sometime in the near future. Cheers.

[BMProjects]

I think MS had already put "adequate" effort in this project, considering the priority of the whole WM platform. They seemed to have more interest in push Office to the other platforms than bring other apps back. I'm a lumia user, so I really really hope the prosperity of WM and more apps. But personally, I don't encourage any developer waste his time on this platform until MS take it seriously.

[matthiasg]

reminiscent of other microsoft open source projects .. lets see

[matthiasg]

@LeoNatan if i look at https://github.com/Microsoft/WinObjC/graphs/contributors i see 25 contributors but basically only 2-4 main committers and thus limited amount of changes (but i would assume the subject matter to be more difficult than eg a javascript library).

If this project is really important to microsoft, i would assume it to be more important to them as e.g angular-material would be to google (a subproject of a project). Right now they arent there, judging by the commits etc, but at least they are involved. so lets give them constructive feedback that actually improves the situation and focus on getting real apps to work with proper code-sharing etc.

in the long term i would assume making the entire app just recompilable is a fools errant (running behind the entire time). I would rather want them to make it as recompilable as possible to enable code-sharing between the ios and the 'ported' windows app and then adjust only the most important ui parts and backend services where needed. That would mean proper C library support etc of course, but i think they are already getting there (as far as i know). Not perfect but only real IOS devs with real big and small apps can answer this definitively.

[LeoNatan]

@matthiasg Not even close. API is still at iOS 6 level. Some 7 API was stubbed out, but not usable. Meanwhile iOS 8 & 9 SDK includes some of the most major changes to UI, layout, presentation, network, etc. No e can be found here. And Apple is not standing still. By the time some iOS 7 SDK API is implemented, it will be even further away.

[jwhitehorn]

case and point for @LeoNatan : https://github.com/Microsoft/WinObjC/blob/683f6d6f225596d6cbfc16e518635d34a32bf6dc/Frameworks/Foundation/NSJSONSerialization.mm

It's hard to believe there are many, non-hello world, iOS apps that don't use JSON to some degree, and NSJSONSerialization has been the defacto library for several iOS versions.

[jpros]

@LeoNatan however, you have to acknowledge that they have done a great work so far, and the biggest part is from iPhone SDK 1 until iOS SDK 6. If they manage to finish this iOS 6 SDK until mid 2016, I think it is possible to finish iOS SDK 7 by the end of the year.

[LeoNatan]

@jpros What you say is very inaccurate. These old systems and their APIs are mostly deprecated or changed completely. Sure, a lot of Foundation and Core Foundation have their foundations (pun intended) in OS X and NextStep even. But the UI and networking have changed so much, that implementing 7 and below seems almost counter productive at this point.

[matthiasg]

@LeoNatan that was my point .. it seems they are not really interested in it sadly. quite sad for them to start with such an old api.

what is disappointing is that they demonstrated and heavily implied something else in the demos.

[jpros]

@LeoNatan Indeed the networking and UI changed a lot in SDK 7, at least for us developers. However I think the basis underground are still the same (at least on the networking part). Anyway, we can point to them what are the priorities for a basic application, keep testing and providing feedback.