Microsoft will be offering his recently acquired mobile app development technology Xamarin free with Visual Studio. Thanks to it, Android and iOS developers will benefit from extended functionalities of both tools.
The announcement was made at Microsoft’s Build Conference 2016, following the company’s acquisition of Xamarin in late February this year. Xamarin is a start-up that lets developers build mobile apps for multiple platforms using Microsoft’s C# programming language.
Microsoft said that Xamarin will be now free for all visual studio users: Visual Studio Enterprise, Professional and free Community Edition users. Xamarin is also making a free app available for Mac OS users. What is more, Microsoft disclosed plans top make the Xamarin SDK open-source, including its runtime, libraries and command line tools, through the .NET Foundation. Offering Xamarin free comes as a big news while premium versions of Xamarin cots reached even $2,000 a year.
This news comes after Microsoft announced earlier at Build 2016 that Linux command lines are coming to Windows 10
We can easily notice the fact that Microsoft has plans to target the developers that are not only making apps for Windows OS. As it has been speculated, the company’s ultimate purpose is to get more developers and companies to use their cloud computing platform, Azure, where they compete strongly with Google and Amazon,
At the Build Conference, Miguel de Icaza, the Xamarin co-founder gave an on-stage demonstration of Xamarin, highlighting the possibility to create and and preview non-Windows apps on a Windows PC using Xamarin, without having to use another machine.
“This is great because you no longer have to invest in a chair that spins,” he joked.
All in all, Microsft’s trends at Build 2016 are quite clear as GeekWire states: trying to pull developers of all kinds away from OS X and Linux, and positioning Windows as the OS for open-source, cross-platform development.