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Microsoft buys cross-platform mobile development tool vendor Xamarin

By Ng Chong Seng - on 25 Feb 2016, 10:03am

Microsoft buys cross-platform mobile development tool vendor Xamarin

Microsoft has just announced that it’s acquiring Xamarin, creator of .NET tools that over 1.3 million developers use to write iOS, Android, and Windows apps, for an undisclosed sum.

A long-rumored move, Microsoft’s buying of Xamarin makes tremendous sense. For one, Xamarin's tools allow C#-wielding developers to share code and write native apps for other platforms in an environment they’re familiar with. Xamarin also integrates well with Microsoft Visual Studio, Azure, Office 365, and the Enterprise Mobility Suite.

Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie:

With today’s acquisition announcement we will be taking this work much further to make our world class developer tools and services even better with deeper integration and seamless mobile app dev experiences. The combination of Xamarin, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Team Services, and Azure provides a complete mobile app dev solution that provides everything you need to develop, test, deliver and instrument mobile apps for every device. We are really excited to see what developers build with it.

I can’t help but wonder if this is part of paving the way for Microsoft’s Universal Windows Platform apps to go native (or truly universal) on other platforms, especially on mobile.

Microsoft will be sharing more information about future plans at its annual Build developer conference in end March.

Source: Microsoft.

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