Continuous .NET C# and F# IDE

Frank is working hard to make Continuous the best IDE on the iOS platform. Pretty soon the awesomeness will be taken to a new level, so hang on to your seats ;-)

This is a huge achievement in itself - creating an IDE that wraps up the Roslyn compilers into a useable set of tools. The really difficult stuff seems to be done and works well. But it's the little things that let this app down. My main gripe is the project explorer system. It's not the most intuitive to use and has bugs: newly added files are placed into folders many layers deeper than you asked. There's no way to remove a file from a project nor to add one. Most crucially, the app will sometimes crash when adding files to a solution and completely corrupt the solution/project architecture. I've lost several hours of work this way. It is possible to rebuild a lost structure of files but after the second time, I just gave up. Shame, because I would love to use this tool for creating frameworks, prototypes and other stuff that can usefully be done on my iPad. Not quite there yet. But keep going. With a bit more polish and bug removal this could be a really, really useful tool. It is impressive in what has been achieved. Just not quite ready for serious use yet. Also, the editor can get a bit cranky over tabs and sometimes the cursor won't behave with respect to end of lines. But you can live with that. Please implement intellisense comment additions. UPDATE: About a year after writing my first review I thought I would give the new version a go. The many bug fixes claimed by the author don’t appear to have resolved any of my original complaints. The app is still very buggy and consistently gets confused when adding new classes. The file management seems particularly poor, often showing up duplicates of projects and reporting spurious errors. Without warning the app will corrupt the file structure leaving you with garbage projects. The only resolution seems to be to Zip your solution and export it to your laptop where you can then recover your work. If I have to do that then I might as well just use my laptop. I’ve lowered my rating because I think the app should have been stabilised by now.

Not seen an update in over a year :(

...but the developer seems to have abandoned this project with many basic things simply broken. Character arrays in C#. The Split method. Some linq constructs. As it stands now, both C# and F# are essentially unusable. All issues that have been reported, acknowledged, and then ignored. Steer clear until there are further updates. Until the issues are fixed then the price is just daylight robbery.

At last I can use my iPad to code. This app just needs Git and iCloud support and it's a (rare) 5* product.

As a developer, I can now work on my iPad Pro! This app allows me to prototype my app screens on the fly and see them running as I type. Truly impressive.

I guess you have to waste your money to find out you can’t have custom delegates. Maybe I am missing something but the code from Visual Studio doesn’t work unless you use EventHandler. Useless. Money wasted.

I love using this app whenever i feel like coding, but sometimes when i run the code (even without auto-run) it for some reason runs the same command multiple times. I can definitely see this app blowing up and becoming a great app for coding, it just needs some bug fixes. Things i could suggest are: fix the code running bug i previously mentioned, let the user delete text when typing into a readline console, make a debugger, and maybe some better explanations for how different functions work within the app. I still love using this, I just think it needs some work to be done.

A C# IDE on my iPad for under $15 that lets me quickly edit and test pixel perfect Xamarin Forms xaml prototypes with no deployment overhead? Heck yeah! The thing hard crashes every time I wrap MainPage in a NavigationPage or try to use a ViewCell written in code? Rough edges like an EntryPointNotFound exception that’ll never go away (but also doesn’t stop running my app)? Support that boils down to a self-help forum with no posts from the app author? Heck, yeah. It’s got those too. If it were billed as a xaml-only UI mocking tool and didn’t try to do anything else, concentrating on doing that well (or just console logs and reads. really any subset of a full IDE), I’d be game. As is, it’s got Icarus Syndrome. It flew too close to the sun and ended up in the drink. I am encouraged that it’s had a few recent-ish updates. I’m holding out some hope. It’s got so much potential, just waaaay too rough to say it’s followed through.

1. Compiler errors are off screen on iPhone 2. No template support (ie cw tab tab)