In its day 2 keynote speech at Microsoft Annual Build 2016, Microsoft announced that Xamarin will now be in every edition of Visual Studio for no extra cost. Scott Guthrie, executive vice president at Microsoft announced that Xamarin cross platform solution will now be integrated into Visual Studio as well as in Visual Studio Community Edition. The Visual Studio Community Edition is free for education and academic research, open source projects, individual developers and small professional teams.
Xamarin is now free
Apparently developers can now use C# and F# to develop and publish native apps for Android devices as well as the devices running on iOS from Visual Studio directly. Also, there will be no limitations of app size. Furthermore, a new free Xamarin Studio Community Edition is created for developers on the Mac which is available as Visual Studio Professional or Enterprise subscription.
The corporate vice president at Visual Studio, Julia Liuson gave a statement saying,
“Microsoft sees Xamarin Studio as a permanent product that will serve as its IDE on the Mac”. She further added, “Microsoft is interested in keeping the Xamarin brand somewhat independent from Microsoft at least for the time being”.
The Xamarin SDK for Mac, Android, and iOS will be released soon under the MIT license. The tools will be released through the .NET Foundation reportedly.
Microsoft since long has been focusing on providing apps for different platforms and the latest Build 2016 is certainly witnessing some very promising and useful declarations.
In the first-day keynote speech, the company announced its partnership with Canonical and the ability to run Ubuntu on Windows 10 followed by the interesting Windows 10 Anniversary Update which includes many new features and opportunities for developers.
You can download the free copy of Xamarin from here.
