Yesterday Microsoft announced that the Xamarin platform (the ability to run C# apps on iOS and Android) would be free with all versions of Visual Studio 2015 Update 2. This is great news and takes away a barrier for developers to use their .NET skills to write cross-platform apps.
We’ve had a number of free libraries for Xamarin for a while so I just wanted to post a quick reminder:-
Charming Apps – Provides consistent UWP style APIs you can call across iOS, Android and Windows platforms for many common tasks. From reading the app manifest properties at runtime through to UI elements and integration with platform functions like SMS, Email etc.
Xamarin Forms Maps Windows Renderers – Currently Xamarin Forms Maps only has renderers for iOS, Android and Windows Phone Silverlight. This package adds renderers for WinRT and UWP platforms.
Device Picker – Currently only supporting Windows platforms this adds a UWP style device picker to Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 8.1 projects.
We’re continuing to extend the Charming apps libraries and will monitor as Xamarin Forms evolves…
In The Hand Ltd 