Microsoft Visual Studio Xamarin News: Xamarin Now Free for All

By Marvie Basilan, Christian Post Contributor Friday, April 01, 2016

There's a lot of excitement in the realm of Microsoft as the company declared that Xamarin will now be available at no cost for all Visual Studio versions.

Xamarin CEO Nat Friedman said in a blog post, "As of today, we are including Xamarin in Visual Studio at no extra cost. Xamarin will be in every edition of Visual Studio, including the widely-available Visual Studio Community Edition, which is free for individual developers, open source projects, academic research, education, and small professional teams."

The cross-platform app development framework was recently acquired by Microsoft and Thursday's announcement only means developers can now have access to the tools that allows for building applications for Android and iOS.

While developers will definitely need to have a Visual Studio Enterprise subscription to use several enterprise-oriented features which have been restricted to some, the rest of the editions don't have restrictions. Interested users will just need to download Xamarin Studio or Xamarin for Visual Studio to start experiencing the framework.

Aside from the announcement regarding free use, Friedman also revealed that changes have been applied to the Mono runtime. Users can now integrate C# with apps and games on various platforms including Android, Mac, iOS, Windows, and even PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

The open sourcing that Microsoft has decided to apply will also release libraries and tools on Github. Xamarin Forms will now be available for existing accounts, meaning users can now explore the toolkit for building various interfaces.

Before Microsoft acquired the company, a lot of developers complained about the platform's pricy tag and though general reviews prove the strength and likability of Xamarin, its pricing became a huge issue for many potential buyers.

With the .NET and C# tools now free for use, it is expected that more downloads will be seen in the next weeks, and the future for the amazing framework may be brighter than what the founders initially planned.