Wednesday 22 January 2014

Microsoft and Xamarin Tighten Mobile App Development Ties


The talk of the tech world is now circling round the two companies Microsoft and Xamarin. It is all about the new tie-up between the two. To make things easier for developers, Xamarin and Microsoft are moving up to the integration work to create apps for iOS as well as Android with the help of C#. The two companies announced on 13th of November that there is a marketing collaboration between both the companies and the sales is going tighter right now.

Xamarin is being supported as an add-in by Visual Studio. The new partnership between Xamarin and Microsoft will further lead to better changes, and the integration will be moving on to a better level. The new release by Xamarin is a full integration with the Portable class library projects of Microsoft in IOS as well as Android Apps. The above PCL support was developed with the help of Microsoft.

The course that is recently launched by Microsoft and Xamarin known as Xamarin University training course is about to be given free for the subscribers of MSDN. This will be commencing from January 2014. The subscribers of MSDN will be availing this new trial as well as paid options for the subscribers of Xamarin. This will be provided for teams as well as individuals according to the deal.

As per the information provided by Xamarin’s CEO and cofounder Nat Friedman, it has around 400,000 developers to their credit. Each day, this number is increased with an addition of 1000 developers. It is also a known fact that the majority of applications that are developed with the help of Xamarin are used as business or enterprise applications.

For many years, Xamarin founders were also a part of the Microsoft’s program, Visual Studio Industry Partner, Microsoft authorities had kept themselves away from Xamarin. The reason to this attitude is that Microsoft was not sure whether Xamarin needed an extended support for Visual studio, especially for the platforms that were non-Microsoft. When the restrictions were removed by Microsoft, Xamarin was able to extend Visual studio for the purpose of supporting non-Microsoft platforms.

Xamarin has made use of C# as the language used for the purpose of mobile development. This language is one of the easiest languages used by mobile developers of all times for the purpose of developing applications for platforms like Android, iOS and Windows 8.

According to Freidman, Xamarin has been working independently. But these days, they are in partnership with Microsoft, and the partnership is now stronger than ever. The terms of the deal are yet to be disclosed. As per the information, there was little exchange of money between these two companies.

As per Freidman, the deal is a beginning of the strong partnership with the Titan Microsoft. He also stated that this partnership can turn out to be a path full of new opportunities for the company Xamarin. This could also provide support for cross platform development for other major products of Microsoft like SharePoint and Office.

Carrie miller is an employee of Zealous System which specializing in web application development services. He spends his leisure time by writing on topics based on improving business through technology, thus making your work easier. The tie-up between Microsoft and Xamarin is described in this article.