Build 2016: Microsoft Announces New Xamarin, Azure Services & Tools for Developers

Recall Microsoft's February acquisition of Xamarin, a cross-platform provider for mobile app development, reportedly used by more than 1.3 million developers. Microsoft is already making Xamarin capabilities available to developers - good news for those companies which subscribed to Xamarin for development of mobile applications.

Scott Guthrie, Microsoft's executive vice president of the Cloud and Enterprise Group, announced at Build 2016 that Microsoft is including Xamarin capabilities in Visual Studio Community - itself a free, fully-featured, extensible IDE for creating modern applications for Windows, Android, and iOS, as well as web applications and cloud services. Already the Visual Studio Community webpage declares "Now with Xamarin: Deliver great mobile apps.

Further, Visual Studio Enterprise subscribers will have access to Xamarin's advanced enterprise capabilities at no cost.

Microsoft is also making Xamarin Studio for OS X free as a community edition. This, says Microsoft, "Is helping developers more easily build native cross-platform mobile applications."

Finally, Microsoft announced its commitment in the coming months to open source the Xamarin SDK (including its runtime, libraries and command line tools) as part of the .NET Foundation.

With these announcements, Microsoft claims it:

Extends its commitment to offering choice and flexibility to every customer across every platform and device - merging the .NET and Xamarin ecosystems together to provide an unmatched mobile development and DevOps experience. Now developers can deliver fully native cross-platform mobile app experiences to all major devices, including iOS, Android and Windows.

Four new Azure services for developers

Guthrie further announced new Azure services aimed at helping developers to both address operational realities and get ...