I’ve been itching to expand my Prayer Odyssey project to include native mobile apps. I believe it will be more of a need than a nice to have given how notifications work and how a truly responsive experience can be trickier than it initially seems. For me, I’ve had my eyes on Xamarin for quite a while now.
But not anymore!!! In case you missed it (because I sure did), it was announced that Xamarin will now be included free in Visual Studio thanks to Microsoft’s acquistion of Xamarin. This is all access, with the individual platforms as well as the Xamarin.Forms library which makes it really fast and simple to build cross platform apps using all the C# goodness you know and love (at least I do) 8^D
This allows me to really get a great jump on building out my mobile apps, and only worry about the app store fees closer to actual publishing time. Both the standalone studio and Visual Studio integration versions of the platform have fared well, so I’m excited to dig in! Microsoft is doing a great job at embracing open source and providing tools across all platforms.
Dare I say we’ve reached the golden age of multi-platform development?! 8^D