Xamarin + Visual Studio developing apps for iOS, Windows and Android

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A number of UK Universities are now moving to teach true Mobile development courses teaching mobile development for iOS, Android and Windows.

With https://www.DreamSpark.com all institution get FREE copies of Visual Studio for all Students and teaching labs. 

https://www.Xamarin.com provides Visual Studio add-ins so that you can develop your iOS, Android and Windows apps all in a single solution so this means your primary IDE for all environments can be Visual Studio and write your apps entirely in C#, sharing the same code on iOS, Android, Windows and Mac. This allows students to reuse their favourite .NET libraries, and still easily incorporate platform-specific libraries and frameworks when they want to.

Building for a Mac using Windows and Visual Studio

https://xamarin.com/visual-studio Xamarin extensions support building, deploying, and debugging on simulator or device.

Xamarin.iOS for Visual Studio allows native iOS applications to be developed and tested on Windows computers, with a networked Mac providing the build and deployment services. Xamarin provides new Visual Studio features that enable iOS development, including iOS device Toolbar, File > New Project for iOS apps, and iOS Project Property pages.

You will however need one Mac within your teaching labs to undertake the build and deployment.

For some institutions this is a prohibiting factor. A perfect solution to teaching a cross platform course. https://www.MacinCloud.com is cloud based solution with a dedicated Academic Plan.

MacinCloud allows current students, teachers and school staff from government accredited, high schools, colleges, universities and other accredited educational institutions to enjoy discounts from MacinCloud service offerings for non-commercial, academic use.

They offer the following pricing models for Academic Users Only

3-Hour Daily $16per month Up to 3 Hours per day 1GB Hard Drive Space iOS SDK and Tools for iPhone/iPad App Development and Mac App Development
included

5-Hour Daily $20per month for Academic Users Only Up to 5 Hours per day 1GB Hard Drive Space iOS SDK and Tools for iPhone/iPad App Development
Mac App Development included

8-Hour Daily $30per month for Academic Users Only Up to 8 Hours per day 1GB Hard Drive Space iOS SDK and Tools for iPhone/iPad App Development
Mac App Development included

No Time Limit $35per month for Academic Users Only No Time Limit per day 1GB Hard Drive Space iOS SDK and Tools for iPhone/iPad App Development Mac App Development included