Microsoft to acquire Xamarin: Build native mobile apps on any platform using C#

  • Article

In the last week of February, Microsoft has signed an agreement to acquire Xamarin, a leading platform provider for mobile app development. In conjunction with Visual Studio, Xamarin provides a rich mobile development offering that enables developers to build mobile apps using C# and deliver fully native mobile app experiences to all major devices – including iOS, Mac OS, Android, and Windows.

Xamarin’s approach enables developers to take advantage of the productivity and power of .NET to build mobile apps, and to use C# to write to the full set of native APIs and mobile capabilities provided by each device platform. This enables developers to easily share common app code across their iOS, Android and Windows apps while still delivering fully native experiences for each of the platforms.

Through the Xamarin Test Cloud, various types of mobile developers including C#, Objective-C, Java and hybrid app builders can test and improve the quality of apps using thousands of cloud-hosted phones and devices.

To get a great and quick introduction to Xamarin, have a look at the "Top 10 Xamarin videos" on Channel9!

With the announcement of the acquisition, we will make our world class developer tools and services even better with deeper integration and seamless mobile app development experiences. The combination of Xamarin, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Team Services, and Azure provides a complete mobile app development solution that provides everything needed to develop, test, deliver and instrument mobile apps for every device.

More information and plans for the future will be shared at the //Build 2016 conference in San Francisco coming up on March 30 at 5pm (CET). Make sure you don’t miss the keynotes streamed live on the //Build website.

And just a quick reminder that during the whole month of March 2016, you have a chance to win daily prizes when watching select top, free online trainings for developers, IT and database professionals and students on our “31 Days of Learning” website.