App Center Blog
The latest news, updates and information for mobile developers using Visual Studio App Center
Latest posts
The Ship List: Visual Studio App Center May Update
May has been an exciting month for the Visual Studio App Center team, full of events, new updates, and the start of summer in Seattle. As covered in our recap post, Microsoft Build was a busy event for our team, with some big announcements shared with the community. Between our announced partnership with GitHub, automatic publishing of your app to the stores, and our Visual Studio Code plugin, we had plenty of exciting news to share and were also excited to have the opportunity to speak to hundreds of developers at our booth. Build was just the beginning, though, as we have a few more recent releases we a...
Webhooks and Email Notifications in Visual Studio App Center Build
We’re excited to announce the launch of build status notifications for Visual Studio App Center! Based on your feedback, we know some of you are customizing your build definitions to notify your team about the build status. Now you can say goodbye to these custom steps and simply use the email and webhook notifications feature in App Center to stay in the know. Our team's mission is to make app development as easy as possible for you and your team. Build is a key step in your Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) app development pipeline. As developers, you want to automatically be notified of...
Microsoft //Build 2018: GitHub Integration, Faster DevOps, and New Distribution Features
Last week we spent an exciting three days at Microsoft Build 2018, which took place at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle, WA. We'd like to thank those of you who attended, especially those who stopped by to say "hi" at our booth in the Expo hall; it was great to speak with so many of you. For those of you who were unable to attend, or in case you missed the App Center news amidst all the other news, we wanted to take a moment to highlight some of our favorite announcements from the event. Microsoft and GitHub Partner to Empower Developers The continued partnership between Microsoft and GitHub i...
Microsoft and GitHub Present: A Solution for Mobile CI
Microsoft and GitHub are continuing to empower developers with great tools so they can ship high-quality apps faster and with greater confidence. The new Visual Studio App Center app in the GitHub Marketplace provides mobile developers with a powerful Continuous Integration (CI) experience tailored for GitHub users. With a CI solution at their fingertips, iOS, Android, Xamarin, and React Native developers with code on GitHub can automate their Build-Test-Distribute process for their apps. Your Mobile Projects with App Center and GitHub With this integration, developers building iOS, Android, Xamarin, and React ...
Customize Your Workflow Notifications with App Center and Azure Logic Apps
Our customers love App Center because it provides them with a feature-rich Continuous Integration (CI) service that works for the most common scenarios. In many cases, developers need to extend a specific service or feature to make it fit into their existing workflow. As an API-first product, we try to either build these features, or provide an API that developers can plug in to other services to customize their workflow and achieve their specific scenario. When building an app, it's important to stay in the know by getting continuous updates on what's happening with your app. App Center offers integrations wit...
App Center: API-First CI/CD for iOS and Android App Development
It’s common for developers to use Visual Studio App Center alongside all the tools they love and rely on, and respecting those preferences and investments is central to the way we design and think about App Center. We hope to put the power to extend and flex your workflow back in your hands by exposing as much as possible through our public API. In pursuit of this mission, we've chosen to release multiple open source contributions, so you get the most out of App Center as we continue to build new and exciting features. Bitrise, CircleCI, Nevercode, BuddyBuild, and More The appcenter-cli was built to support your ...
Guest Blog | Playing in the Sandbox: How We Created Minecraft’s Multi-Platform Design
This is special guest post from Mark Grinols, a development lead on the Minecraft team at Microsoft. A key aspect of Minecraft that players love is the ability to play with family and friends on nearly any platform they choose. Offering this breadth of choice to hundreds of millions of players worldwide is a substantial engineering challenge. In addition to the original version in Java on Windows and macOS, we’ve added cross-platform functionality with the C++ codebase using the Bedrock Engine, which runs on multiple form factors and OSes, including mobile (iOS, Android and Windows Mobile), consoles (Xbox and ...
The Ship List: App Center March 2018 Update
Spring has arrived in many places, and with it comes fresh new opportunities and ideas. As always, the Visual Studio App Center team is working on features and updates that will enable you to build better iOS and Android apps, as well as ship them faster and with greater confidence. This month, we have a few new releases to share with you. App Center Error Reporting for Xamarin-Based Apps A few weeks ago we announced the release of a much awaited feature, App Center Errors. There's a new Diagnostics item in the App Center portal, which includes both the previously available Crashes service for uncaught...
Fast Meets Faster: Speed Up Your CodePush Workflow with the React Native Tools Extension for Visual Studio Code
Recently, we released CodePush functionality in the React Native (RN) Tools extension for VS Code. CodePush is a feature in Visual Studio App Center that allows React Native and Cordova developers to push updates instantly over-the-air to end users. This is the ideal solution for hot-fixing your app when waiting isn’t an option, as well as for a CI/CD workflow. If you need a primer on CodePush and its abilities, start here: Deliver Lightning Fast Updates to your Users with CodePush: A Beginner’s Guide. App Center enables its users to continuously build, test, release, and monitor iOS, Android, Windows, and macO...