Microsoft today announced some amazing news:
- Preview versions of the next generation versions of Visual Studio and .NET
- A new free and full-featured Visual Studio Community edition
- Open up Visual Studio and .NET to developers on all major platforms by open-sourcing the core .NET server stack
First the big news. Microsoft just launched the preview versions of Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 2015. This release includes the “Roslyn” .NET compiler platform, new language features in C#, improved debugging and profiling, and code analysis tools. And the biggest new of all – VS2015 supports “C#, C++ and HTML/JavaScript development targeting iOS, Android, Windows and more.” There’s even a Visual Studio Emulator for Android (see picture below). I’m drooling!
We can finally build iOS and Android apps, thus truly creating cross-platform solutions.
Microsoft is open sourcing the full server-side .NET Core stack. This includes the .NET Framework Libraries, .NET Core Framework Libraries and the RyuJit VM, and allowing .NET applications to not only run on Windows but also run on both Mac OS X and Linux.
Microsoft has also created a new Visual Studio product, called Visual Studio Community 2013, which is “free and fully-featured”, supporting all the Visual Studio extensions. You can get it as from today and can be used to “target any platform, from devices and desktop to web and cloud services”. This does not include enterprise applications. Visual Studio 2013 Update 4. The latest update to Visual Studio 2013 is now available and includes “dozens of improvements across the product plus several great new features.” (Visual Studio Community 2013 includes this update.)
Also some new for Xamarin. Microsoft is also providing a discount to eligible MSDN subscribers for Xamarin Business or Enterprise, and increasing the integration between Visual Studio and Xamarin plus a streamlined experience for installing Xamarin from Visual Studio. Xamarin will also add Visual Studio support to its free offering Xamarin Starter Edition later this year. This release will “complement” the release of Visual Studio Community, “opening up .NET cross-platform mobile development to any developer.”
This is amazing news. Microsoft Rocks!
One Response
So how can android apps be developed using C# ?