Xamarin now free in Visual Studio, and Xamarin SDK being open-sourced
Wow. Very, very nice!<p>If anyone from MS is listening:<p>All you need to do to potentially convert me from a Mac user is to address some of the privacy&#x2F;security and &quot;user exploitation&quot; concerns around Windows 10.<p>When I heard that Windows 10 would serve ads to users, just hearing that blacklisted it for me. Anything that serves ads is a low-end bargain-basement crap product, period. You are pegging your entire ecosystem as discount bin trash with those moves. I don&#x27;t mind paying for good stuff, but I won&#x27;t even use that kind of crap for free. Apple would never serve me ads on my login screen.<p>I&#x27;m also very concerned about the total lack of user control over telemetry and phone-home features in Windows. Mac also has this problem, but less. You could leapfrog Mac by making this stuff visible and configurable to the user in an easy way via some kind of control panel. There is an opportunity to do better than Apple here.<p>It&#x27;s not that I would turn it all off. I&#x27;m not a total paranoid in that respect. But I want to see what it is, what it is doing, and have the <i>ability</i> to control my privacy&#x2F;security &quot;envelope.&quot; Obviously if I am doing anything security critical like... oh... I dunno... <i>developing software</i> to be distributed to millions of endpoint devices... then I care a lot about security. Security is not just for huge &quot;enterprise&quot; customers.<p>(Privacy equals security equals privacy, since privacy invasion exposes information that can be used to violate security.)<p>Honestly, the fact of the matter is that Microsoft has a significantly weaker reputation for security and privacy than Apple. That makes me <i>more</i> concerned about MS software phoning home than Apple software. This is a major problem and you have to do something about it, and in the 21st century that means <i>actually fixing the problem</i> rather than relying on PR to con people into thinking you&#x27;ve fixed the problem.<p>The sorts of power users you are trying to convert with all this dev outreach stuff are not morons and they will see through any shallow commitment to security or privacy instantly. Pure PR plays in these areas will make you look worse, not better.<p>That is all.