SEATTLE—With the Xamarin tooling built in to Visual Studio, iOS and Android developers can already use a PC for a big part of their dev process by using the Visual Studio IDE for writing their code. For iOS development, however, there has always been an extra complication: the actual software building and deployment had to take place on a Mac. Visual Studio remotely controls the Apple machine to do this work, so although developers can stay inside the Visual Studio environment they know and love, they still need a Mac on their local network.

Xamarin Live Player, announced today, takes the Mac out of the develop/deploy/debug cycle. With Live Player, iOS apps can be deployed directly onto an iPhone or other iDevice from a PC running Visual Studio, where the code can then be tested and debugged. This means that the Mac is no longer needed for that core development cycle.

The final build and submission to the App Store will still require a Mac, so you can't go without an Apple system entirely, but what this means is that if you want to develop, as many of us do, on a laptop and aren't on the same network as your Mac, you can.

Live Player also supports Android, though this is obviously less of a big deal since direct development and deployment from a PC is already standard for Android.

Microsoft believes its Live Player system is entirely compatible with Apple's rules and regulations for App Store apps. Behind the scenes, the Live Player includes an interpreter for .NET code. This means that running an app through Live Player is slower than it would be if natively built on a Mac, but that's not such a big deal for many aspects of user interface development.

For those of us who are Mac users anyway, yesterday saw the release of Visual Studio for Mac. Visual Studio for Mac is a different codebase from Visual Studio on Windows, but the two products share things like the compiler and build infrastructure, enabling projects to be shared and co-developed between Mac and PC with no conversion or other hurdles to contend with.

Microsoft is also working to better align the various versions of .NET and the XAML user interface development language across its platforms. Later this year, the UWP version of .NET will be updated to support .NET Standard 2.0. Microsoft is also unifying the XAML used for cross-platform Xamarin Forms with that used for UWP. The new XAML, XAML Standard, will allow XAML to be shared (and copy/pasted, the best kind of code reuse) between UWP and Xamarin Forms apps.

Finally, Microsoft is continuing to embrace Linux developers and toolchains on Windows. The current Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) comes out of the box with support for Ubuntu; later this year, Microsoft is adding official support for a SUSE userland and a Fedora userland. It'll even be possible to install all three side by side, giving your Windows machine three different Linux personalities simultaneously. The installation of WSL is also simpler, with the three Linux environments all being installed from the Windows Store.