Samsung lets developers create Tizen apps in .NET

Samsung lets developers create apps for its operating system Tizen with Microsoft’s .NET platform. The manufacturer is developing tools for Visual Studio that will allow developers to debug apps and emulate devices.

Samsung has put a first preview of the .NET tools online. The manufacturer announced the move on Wednesday on the occasion of Microsoft’s Connect(); event in the American city of New York, where the Linux Foundation announced that Microsoft is becoming a paying member of the foundation behind Linux.

In the first preview, developers can only create Tizen apps for mobile devices. That limits the target audience, because smartphones are estimated to make up a small minority of devices with Tizen. Samsung says it has sold 50 million devices with Tizen, but it has released only a few smartphones with its own operating system, which have also been sold in only a few countries. However, all recent TVs from the manufacturer, which dominate the sales lists worldwide, do run on Tizen.

In the future, Visual Studio will allow developers to create apps that work on both mobile and TV with .NET, Samsung says. The tools are still a preview version. The release of .NET support should follow in 2017. The primary way to develop apps for Tizen remains the Web and C frameworks, the South Korean manufacturer says.

Samsung joined Microsoft’s .NET Foundation this summer, in which the US software company seeks to bring companies together to develop for .NET. Its newest member is Google, Microsoft announced.