Build 2016: Microsoft simplifies mobile app development with Visual Studio and Xamarin

Towards the end of February this year, Microsoft announced its acquisition of Xamarin, the maker of .NET tooling that can build apps for iOS, Android and OS X. At the ongoing Build 2016, Microsoft laid out plans for how Xamarin and Visual Studio will come together. Microsoft is making Xamari n’s cross-platform tools available in Visual Studio, from Community up through Enterprise, at no additional cost and is open-sourcing the Xamarin SDK – the core of the Xamarin toolchain. Also, Xamarin’s services (for example, Test Cloud and Xamarin University) will be available along with the existing Microsoft mobile DevOps capabilities. “The integration of Xamarin into Microsoft’s developer tools takes us one step further towards enabling our vision of supporting “any developer, any app, any platform.” With Xamarin you can create fully native apps for Android, iOS, and Windows using the power and productivity of Microsoft’s development tools and services. Together, these and Azure backend services create a comprehensive solution that spans every phase of the mobile development cycle,” says the Visual Studio blog. Looking specifically at the announcements made today, Microsoft reiterated its commitment to open source by open sourcing the Xamarin SDK (runtime, libraries and command line tools). Xamarin announced today that it has already contributed the Mono Project – core to the Xamarin tools – to the .NET Foundation, and the .NET Foundation in turn announced that they will re-release Mono under the MIT License. Also, Unity, JetBrains and Red Hat announced that they are joining the Technical Steering Group of the .NET Foundation.