Cross platform apps with Visual Studio 2013

Woot!

Yeah. That’s right. MS is changing rapidly and phenomenally and some of these manifest in some of the product capabilities and directions.

It was announced this week at TechEd 2014, that developers could build cross platform applications – (woot! again) –  for the Android and iOS platforms right from within VS 2013. You need update 2 of VS 2013 plus the download of Cordova CTP.

Once you do that, you are in a new fantastic world of developing for Windows, iOS and Android right from within your familiar Visual Studio IDE.

I decided to take this for a spin and here a few screen shots.

My First Cordana “Multi-Device Hybrid App”

Look at the various devices one could target – Android, iOS and Windows ARM (new additions)

With Android as the Platform, the various emulators available to test the App.

With iOS and the platform the various iOS emulations available. Ofcourse you will need an actual MAC hardware to build your iOS native binaries.

Windows ARM targets.

Enjoy these new capabilities and one could easily develop for multiple platforms simultaneously. This is a very big advantage for the huge base of developers who are comfortable or just about plain prefer to use Visual Studio as their primary IDE to develop applications, because they like the superior experience Visual Studio provides.