News from Xamarin Evolve: What’s next for Visual Studio and Xamarin

Visual Studio

April 27th, 2016

Less than a month ago, at //BUILD, we announced the integration of Xamarin technology into our Visual Studio product line, furthering our Any Developer, Any App, Any Platform approach and bringing even more power and productivity to the nearly 13 million devs who have already downloaded Visual Studio 2015 and the 10 million who have downloaded Visual Studio Community 2015. This integration provides Visual Studio users (like you :)) great additional value to create beautiful and highly performant native Android, iOS and Windows apps, at no additional cost. The combination of the existing Microsoft product portfolio with Xamarin technology creates an end-to-end solution for every stage of the mobile development lifecycle. We can’t wait to see what you deliver!

Today, at Xamarin Evolve 2016, we are pleased to announce further progress on the integration of Xamarin into Visual Studio. Visual Studio on Windows now provides an end to end developer experience for building iOS apps, so that you can stay in your favorite IDE and build for all platforms.

Debug and test iOS apps from Visual Studio on Windows

We’re introducing two new ways to debug and test your iOS apps directly from within Visual Studio. Our iOS Simulator lets you simulate and interact with your iOS apps in Visual Studio — even supporting multi-touch interactions on Windows machines with capable touch screens. We also unveiled our iOS USB remoting, which makes it possible to deploy and debug apps from Visual Studio to an iPad or iPhone plugged into your Windows PC.

Build and continuous integration for iOS and Android apps with Visual Studio Team Services

We’ve improved out of the box Visual Studio Team Services tasks for building Xamarin apps and using Xamarin Test Cloud to help you get going quickly on continuous integration (CI) in the cloud. These features work for both Xamarin Android and iOS since Team Services can build, test, and deploy your Xamarin iOS apps via your own integrated Mac or a 3rd party cloud service like MacinCloud or MacStadium. You can even extend your CI workflow into continuous delivery using release management and the new HockeyApp and Google Play Team Services extensions.

Test your iOS & Android apps on real devices

The new Test Recorder Visual Studio Plugin brings Test Recorder’s ability to generate test scripts to Visual Studio users. Simply interact with your app on your device or in the simulator and Test Recorder automatically generates scripts that can be run on thousands of devices with Xamarin Test Cloud’s automated app testing.

We’re excited to see increased developer productivity by enabling seamless experiences in Visual Studio, as a single IDE for all mobile & server platforms. For more information about the news, please check out Nat Friedman’s first-ever Official Microsoft Blog post, then read the technical click-down posts by Miguel de Icaza and team on the Xamarin blog.

Finally, watch some of the Xamarin Evolve 2016 live-streamed keynotes and sessions to learn more.