From the cloud to mobile, Microsoft on day 2 of its Build developers conference announced important new additions to the Xamarin cross-platform development tools.
The company today released a preview of the Xamarin Live Player coding environment, which makes development and debugging of applications faster. It allows developers to create applications for Android and iOS in Visual Studio. According to Microsoft, you pair your device with Visual Studio and hit debug, and the application is deployed to Live Player, from there developers can develop and test changes to the application without having to recompile or redeploy.
“This brings the full debugging capabilities of .NET on iOS,” Terry Myerson, executive vice president at Microsoft, showed. “You can build rich iOS applications in Visual Studio directly on your PC.”
Live Player extensions for Visual Studio 2017 and Visual Studio for Mac, announced yesterday, are available today in the Microsoft Store, and Xamarin Live Player apps are available in both Google Play and the iOS App Store.
For further cross-platform capability, Ubuntu is in the Windows Store, and SUSE Linux and Red Hat Fedora distros are in the works, Myerson said.
To manage mobile apps, Microsoft today introduced a preview of Visual Studio Mobile Center, which was announced in November. Mobile Center, designed for apps targeting Android and iOS, gets new features today, including the ability to automate builds and distribution, to gather user data and push notifications to Universal Windows Platform (UWP) users.
Mobile Center also gives developers choice in build tools (VSTS, Bitbucket, GitHub) that make it easy to set up continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines, the company said.
