Microsoft Makes App Building Even Easier By Integrating Visual Studio With Its New Platform

Microsoft announced in February that it was buying a less known startup called Xamarin. Xamarin is a startup  for mobile app development. It enables developers build an app once and have it run on any device or web browser. This makes the startup a hot cake but that’s not just what’s exciting about it.

Pictured left to right: Nat Friedman, CEO and co-founder of Xamarin; Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of the Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise Group; and Miguel de Icaza, CTO and co-founder of Xamarin.

Yesterday Microsoft announced  its plan to integrate Xamarin with Visual Studio.  What makes it even more interesting is that this integration is totally free. Visual Studio Community (Microsoft’s free development environment for individual developers, small professional teams, open source projects, and education) includes a fully functional edition of Xamarin tools enabling developers to target Android and iOS applications. In addition, a community edition of Xamarin Studio (Xamarin’s development environment that runs on OS X) is now available with a license similar to Visual Studio Community. Visual Studio Professional and Enterprise include Xamarin’s professional and enterprise features at no additional cost  said John Montgomery is the Director of Program Management for Visual Studio and .NET in the post.

Judging by the  comments from some developers in the post, this is a welcome development that will make multi platform app creation an easier task.

Image Source: Microsoft