TLDR In my view in short term: yes, in long term: no way!
Xamarin/Mono stack missed many features of Microsoft's .Net stack and will always suffer if it is an economical force behind it. Xamarin Studio for example is it in a painful state: bugs are slowly fixed, the recommended version it is still Visual Studio, but you can also use Xamarin Studio for various purposes. It is stuck with Gtk# 2.x, though very nice styled and with an unknown underlying framework for developers (Xwt).
Xamarin bought RoboVM, which means that if you are either a C# or Java developer and you want to target iOS, you may need in the past to rely on Xamarin (now Microsoft).
My perspective about medium plan with Mono platform: Mono will be less ambiguous target and more bugs will be addressed just having one implementation in between .Net, CoreCLR and Mono. Another good thing is that I would assume that in future there will be merged the CoreCLR on Linux with Mono, either by migrating the GC of CoreCLR (which is more advanced that whatever Mono had) or migrating the debugging infrastructure from Mono to CoreCLR. This means that if you will target Asp.Net Core 1.0+ you will definitely benefit from the platform correctness and a better experience deploying to Linux.
Another good part of the toolset it is simply that Microsoft .Net as merged platform will work directly to iOS, maybe with a lower license costs.
But this is just for me 1 to 2 years stuff, but after this I would assume that some parts will be more negative for non Microsoft platforms:
- support may be delayed and slowed down, in particular that supporting .Net will be needed to be extensive to most of Mono targets, CPU architectures and so on
- no competition even partnering competition (as is with Java/OpenJDK ecosystem) will mean that IDE options (SharpDevelop is basically discontinued, maybe Xamarin Studio will be also discontinued) will be basically from two vendors, one of them with full integration with various frameworks (Microsoft) and one very well integrated for code editing (JetBrains). Both of them may be for money, so I would assume that will not be so much startup friendly
- having close to a monopoly as the single vendor implementing your own runtime is kind of kill-switch to make your next project to target .Net excluding you are not Microsoft or you already have a big investment into .Net technology
Xamarin acquisition by Microsoft is actually a good thing. As for know, they even made development for IOS possible even on Windows. After all, they need to promote their own products. In any case, Xamarin.Android and Xamarin.IOS now are grouped into Xamarin platform with other Xamarin products like Xamarin Test Cloud. Here's more about Xamarin programming and the platform itself.
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