Xamarin’s fingerprints are all over Microsoft apps like Visual Studio, Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and the Enterprise Mobility Suite, with other tools in the background, too.
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Microsoft is likely to keep Xamarin alive, post-acquisition, because of its popularity with the developer crowd.
On the client side of the landscape, the viability of the “Universal” app framework for Windows 10 bodes about as well for Microsoft as anyone with under 5 percent of the vote in the SC primary.
The company said in a statement: “Xamarin’s approach enables developers to take advantage of the productivity and power of.NET to build mobile apps, and to use C# to write to the full set of native APIs and mobile capabilities provided by each device platform”. Most mobile applications need a back-end in the cloud, and one optimized for C# and integrated with Visual Studio will be waiting for them on Azure.
Xamarin’s 350 employees will continue to work with Microsoft including co-founders Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman. The acquisition could prove to be a useful one, and the added integration with iOS and Android will only help Microsoft’s cause, given that this way iPhones and Samsung Galaxy phones will be able to use Microsoft apps easily. Same for Xamarin. Forms.
Microsoft said it agreed to buy San Francisco startup Xamarin in the tech giant’s latest move to attract more software engineers to write programs using its cloud services. It also makes a lot of tools that are used by other developers to build apps for multiple platforms. Integrating Xamarin subscriptions into the new Visual Studio subscriptions shouldn’t be hard, as both have comparable tiers.
With over 15,000 customers in 120 countries – including hundreds of Fortune 500 companies, Xamarin has come a long way and has over 1.3 million developers utilizing their platform. Microsoft is looking to offer the complete package for developers, with tools that allow them to do anything from writing code that works on all major platforms to serving content from the cloud.
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After removing this feature in Windows 10, Microsoft appears to be working to bring it back with the Redstone update in the summer and evidence that such functionality is already under development has been noticed in the recently-released build 14271.
