@RockyH it’s great to have you here! I’d love to know if you have an answer for @laolusrael’s question at all 
@Mittineague re: ____Script… My favourite is TypeScript which compiles back to JavaScript, it has great support inside Visual Studio and brings a lot of strengths for developers moving to the JavaScript world for the first time.
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Also in response to molona above yes you can use VS for developing Azure Automation. Visual Studio and PowerShell are you r best friends when it comes to Azure.
The biggest thing to consider when developing Mobile Apps… choose the right tool for the job. There are so many considerations with design, online vs offline, hardware integration, screen real estate, security and that’s before you decide on the language and IDE !
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I’m really interested in the differences between Xamarin and PhoneGap… I heard learning Xamarin will help with understanding PhoneGap, is that true?
I run VS on several different hardware specs. I even had it on my Surface Pro 2 which was the same spec as yours. it was certainly slower than on my i5 with 16GB of RAM, but your system more than meets the minimum specs. Do you have a lot of plugins loading? We are continuously improving VS form a speed and feature perspective. I think VS 2015 will be a pretty good performance improvement. Have you tried the preview yet?
This might be too big a question to ask here, but do you have any tips (like a checklist) of considerations you’d go through to help you decide what options to choose?
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@Jasmine a great point to raise… Xamarin and more popularly Xamarin.Forms, allows you to create a shared code base using your C# skills, you need to know more about the underlying operating systems you are targeting, but in the end you get a true “Native” application, PhoneGap creates a wrapper around a SPA (single page application) working in web views which still allows you to utilise a lot of the hardware components etc, but it does not get compiled to native.
I’ve used VisualStudio6.0 to write a few desktop apps. And I’ve used PWS for some hobby localhost sites. But the script flavors were Jscript and VBscript.
Hmmm, I must have been spending too much time here at the forum and missed it.
“compiled” as in node.js server-side?
My question is will Microsoft ever get around to re-adopting WPF and XAML again, or will it continue to be the defacto app development platform with a lack of official support? If not, I can’t imagine building a new framework that’s better, MVVM is rapidly becoming the gold standard even in the web industry and WPF is the original. Everywhere I’ve worked or interviewed is either embracing WPF/XAML or still a dinosaur that’s trying to make WinForms work. I realize there was a pretty slow uptake on WPF/XAML from the industry, but they are waking up and coming to WPF/XAML even now after it’s been abandoned by Microsoft because it’s the best application framework ever built. If it’s extended further and made into a cross-platform phenom it will rule the app development world.
Think of it this way, PhoneGap is built on Cordova. So the apps you build are built with web technologies (HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript). With Xamarin, you develop native apps. So you write in their Xamarin.Forms (very XAML-like), and Xamarin compiles the apps down to native JIT Java code for Android, and precompiled objective C for iOS and C# native apps for Windows. PhoneGap / Cordova produces a wrapper that runs your web app on the device, Xamarin produces platform native apps.
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@ralphm often it comes down to what you are writing and for what audience, so if it is an internal application for your company and they are using just one type of device, then the questions are a lot less. If you are targeting multi-platform, multi-devices then you need to start thinking about all the options…
- screen size
- orientation of screen (what happens when user turns phone/tablet around)
- how long will they be in your app
- does it need to resume or restart
- how will an incoming message/phone call effect their use
- how much data do you need to sync? (static lists, images vs new data)
… these are just a few 
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@polaris_ursa Visual Studio 2015 has some amazing support for WPF / XAML, personally I believe it is the desktop development of the future. There have been some posts/videos recently on Channel9 about it.
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Interested to know what your favourite Microsoft Visual Studio Extensions are?
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I’m not fond of “convention over configuration”. It sounds like there is enough flexibility to suit varying dev preferences, but is there?
@PaulUsher I’m really curious to know which companies are using Xamarin! Can you tell us a few?
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what is it in particular that you don’t agree with?
Thanks Paul, I know there is a strong movement within MS to bring WPF/XAML back (I used to work at MS myself and have worked extensively with Jaime Rodriguez who was one of the most amazing WPF Evangelists). I’m really hoping that as a company official support for WPF/XAML returns, that’s what I was trying to get at. You can still use it as it remains in .Net 4.0 but 2 years ago Microsoft officially dropped support and the WPF Team was absorbed into the Win8 App Dev team. I’m asking will we see it carried forward and improved, and more importantly will there be a new movement to bring it to the cross-platform scene? If we could make apps at my company that work on Windows, Mac and Linux using a single platform (that’s not Qt) then we’d save massive amounts of time and money on our releases.
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