Realm, the mobile platform powering the world’s most responsive applications, today announced support for key Microsoft development platforms and technologies to give developers a comprehensive approach to building modern mobile applications. The Realm Mobile Platform now supports Xamarin, the mobile app development platform used by millions of developers, and is available as an easy-to-install Azure Virtual Hard Drive. Now it is easy for the massive Microsoft developer ecosystem to use Realm and the Microsoft stack to build high-scale, production-ready realtime apps.

Realm has worked closely with the Xamarin developer community for several years, building Xamarin compatibility into the Realm Mobile Database, the world’s leading third party, open source database on over one billion applications. Today’s release brings that work to the high level of stability and depth of features required to support business-critical production use cases.

Xamarin is now fully supported in the Realm Mobile Platform, Realm’s solution for developers to build highly engaging and collaborative apps through live data synchronization between users with offline-first capabilities. This support is a significant step forward for C# developers who can now build interactive and reactive experiences simply by connecting their app, powered by the Realm Mobile Database, to the Realm Object Server. Without writing any serialization or networking code, the Realm Mobile Platform gives developers everything they need to build rich, realtime apps, by handling conflict resolution, user authentication, and customizable permissions. With the Realm Mobile Database storing data on the client, users also get a first-class offline experience.

By building one click access from the Realm Object Server to Microsoft Azure, Realm is creating a unified approach for Xamarin developers to easily build and deploy cross-platform apps with optimal database support built in from day one.

“Realm’s mission is to give mobile developers optimal database solutions to power their data-driven applications,” said Alexander Stigsen, cofounder and CEO of Realm. “Our comprehensive support for Microsoft technologies and platforms gives millions of Xamarin and C# developers a seamless, best-in-class solution for taking their brilliant ideas from initial code to high scale deployment. We can’t wait to see what the community builds with Realm, Xamarin, and Microsoft.”

Realm is also releasing Realm Database support for Windows Desktop, allowing developers to deploy Realm’s object database on the hundreds of millions of computers that support the Win32 API. Developers can now use Realm as the database in their Windows desktop applications and create custom tooling to generate and view Realm data. With this new release, developers receive the same benefits from using an object database and Realm’s APIs as mobile developer communities.

To illustrate how easy it is to use Realm and Microsoft’s technologies together to build mobile applications, Realm and Microsoft’s Mobile Developer Center team built a sample app and tutorial using Xamarin and Azure that demonstrates the power of all these new tools. Please go to https://github.com/realm-demos/realm-draw to download it.