In case you haven’t been following the news around Microsoft’s purchase of Xamarin here is some exciting news. When this merger was first announced we were excited to see Microsoft commit to the Xamarin toolset as well as being hopeful that the business editions would become part of the MSDN collection of software (and thus save us about $2,000 per developer). What we weren’t expecting was for Microsoft to make Xamarin a standard part of Visual Studio, available to all Visual Studio developers. Not just MSDN or retail licensed developers, but all developers, including Visual Studio Community Edition.

This is a big deal for us and other companies wanting to do cross-platform mobile development with C# and .NET. Not only have our expenses been drastically reduced to continue to use the toolsets we love, but now the conversation about working with internal resources at a client to maintain, augment, or otherwise work with this product just got a lot easier. We no longer need to sell them on buying on of their developers a $2000/yr subscription to be able to work with the source we deliver them.

Hopefully this will entice other developers to take their apps to .NET and hopefully that will get their apps on Windows Phone and give it some traction in the market.

In addition to all this already great news, they have also announced that the Xamarin codebase will be open sourced and made available through GitHub. I think we can expect some great community driven improvements coming to Xamarin.Forms as those of us who have been working with it get our hands on the source.

This is a great time to be a .NET developer, and an even better time to be a .NET cross-platform mobile developer.

You can read more details about the announcements on Xamarin’s blog.