[ditados]

Went ahead and downloaded Xamarin Studio for the Mac. Still has an "Enterprise Trial" button, and apparently I still have to login to activate it.

It annoys me to no end that I have to log in to Visual Studio as well (even Community) for it to even open a project, and I wish both Microsoft and Xamarin were more respectful of our privacy.

[andysinclair]

They're providing brilliant developer tools for free and all they are asking for is an email address- give them a break.

[blub]

It's not about a crummy e-mail address, it's about privacy, trust and freedom, things which you get by default with libre software tools and things which Microsoft has not proven that they can deliver.

And that software is not really free, it comes with a nice lock-in in the form of .NET and C#, two technologies under Microsoft's control. After MS has a track record of at least ten years of doing this open source stuff they will get a break.

This thread is proof that for many getting stuff for free is enough to forget a long corporate history and throw their caution to the wind.

[newjersey]

On the other side, I wish app stores required submitting all source code and not binaries. Then, the store would build the app binaries on their end and keep the source code archive somewhere.

Also give the developer an option to make the source code publicly available. How great would that be!

[celticninja]

its not like you even have to give them a real/live email address either. some people just like to complain no matter what.

[starik36]

I have VS2015. I've never had to login or create an account. It's purely optional.

[Mafana0]

I've been using Visual Studio for more than 10 years, it never required a login to work or sent any information to Microsoft without a clear permission.

Having said that, if you really feel that Visual Studio is disrespectful of your privacy, you shouldn't be compromising on that and simply not use the application. I don't understand people who whine about services while they are enjoying them for free.

It's always the same people you never hear complaining about having to create an Apple account to use their developer tools.

[mattmanser]

Because it's so completely unnecessary.

Because once there was a destinction between their program and my data.

[Retra]

> I don't understand people who whine about services while they are enjoying them for free.

It's not hard to understand. Just because you call something a service doesn't make it valuable to your customers. In fact, it could very easily be a burden on them.

[kiproping]

I usually put absolute gibberish info in such cases. It's very annoying. You could also try bugmenot.com