Microsoft makes Xamarin part of Visual Studio and partly open source

Microsoft makes Xamarin part of Visual Studio at no additional cost to users. In addition, there will be a Xamarin Studio Community Edition for OS X that small teams can use for free. Finally, Microsoft makes parts of the Xamarin SDk open source.

Microsoft acquired Xamarin at the end of February and during Build 2016, the software giant announced the first effects of the merger. Not only users of the Enterprise and Professional editions, but also those of the Community Edition of Visual Studio can now use the cross-platform development platform at no extra cost. The Community Edition can be used for free for, among other things, open source projects and by individual developers and educational institutions.

Simultaneously with that announcement, Microsoft announced the release of Xamarin for OS X Community Edition. Individual developers and limited-sized teams can use the software for free to create apps for iOS, Android, and Windows with a Visual Studio Professional or Enterprise subscription.

Microsoft also announced that core components of the Xamarin SDK for Android, iOS and the Mac will be available under an open source license from MIT. Finally, the runtime of Mono, Xamarin’s open source implementation for Microsoft’s .Net framework, is now part of the .Net Foundation and released under an MIT license. Mono’s class libraries were already available under an MIT license.