App Center Blog
The latest news, updates and information for mobile developers using Visual Studio App Center
Latest posts
Distribute Apps Faster with Visual Studio App Center and Azure Functions, Part I
As members of the Visual Studio App Center team, we’re driven to create an easy-to-use, web-based user experience, and our API-first mentality steers our product decisions. We’ve designed App Center to give you and your team ultimate flexibility and freedom: you pick and choose the components that best fit your needs, so you have more time to focus on building features your customers want, not managing day-to-day manual or redundant tasks. In this post, I'll share ways to set up a continuous release pipeline that redistributes your app to beta testers, without any manual work, based on crash and analytics data...
Sweeten Your Apps with Android Oreo & Visual Studio App Center
While the recent release of Android Oreo, the eighth major operating system version since Android launched in 2008, focuses on fundamentals like performance and reliability, it still packs several highlights for both end users and developers. With all of the updates, we’re breaking down a few of our favorite user-facing features and backend tweaks, and sharing how Visual Studio App Center helps you use them to their fullest potential to deliver even better apps. Our Top Three User-Facing Updates Revamped UI Android Oreo’s user interface introduces a new, unified look for app icons on the launcher, an overhaul of ...
Deliver Better iPhone X UX with Visual Studio App Center
The iPhone X is unlike its predecessors in size, design, and operating system. With this new form factor and the recent iOS 11 release, it’s an exciting time to be an iOS developer, but from the introduction of a taller screen, the “notch controversy,” and the removal of the home button, there are big implications for iPhone users and developers. Visual Studio App Center is here to help. With our Test service, which provides cloud-hosted automated UI testing on real devices, across hundreds of hardware, operating system, and version configurations, you can start building and testing on the latest devices and ope...
Win an Xbox One S from Visual Studio App Center
Sign up and tweet for a chance to win one of 10 Xbox One S consoles! As a thank you to all the users who contributed to a fantastic launch, we're celebrating the holidays early by giving away ten Xbox One S bundles to lucky users. Anyone can enter! How to Enter STEP 1: Sign Up If you don't already have an App Center account, create one at appcenter.ms/signup using your Github or Microsoft IDs, social login, or email address. Log into your App Center account at appcenter.ms. Click the “Add New” button in the upper-right corner of your home screen, then "Add new app" and follow the steps to add a new iOS, A...
Guest Blog | Zero to App in 20 Minutes: Build Your First Chat App with Microsoft Azure, Visual Studio App Center, and Rapid
This is a special guest post from David Drobik, co-founder at Rapid. Until recently, we had only one option for communicating with friends, family, and colleagues from our mobile phones: Short Messaging System (SMS). Now, though, we don’t have to limit our communication to 160 characters (the SMS max per message, in case you don’t remember), and the options for real-time communication are virtually limitless. In my work at STRV, creating web and mobile apps for Silicon Valley’s hottest companies and leading global brands, including Caviar, LegalZoom, Hallmark, and Lufthansa, and in developing our own re...
Behind the Scenes @ our Hackathon: Join the Hunt and Ship Intelligent Apps
Hello and G’day, Mike and Rob here*. We’re long-time developers and, in our current roles as Microsoft Global Black Belts, we help our customers set up CI/CD processes and create apps that use the latest technology and services, from Fortune 500 companies building dozens of apps to mobile-first organizations where apps are their business. This keeps us busy, but our team still makes time for fun. A few Microsoft teams recently hosted the Intelligent Cloud Competition, an internal hackathon where four teams competed to build the best cloud-connected, open-source app with real world applicability (no “Hello World...
A/B Test All the Things: React Native Experiments with App Center
Visual Studio App Center helps developers ship better apps faster, but it also helps you build features your users will love. How? We designed App Center to be API-first and fully modular. This means that when you integrate App Center services with your existing toolchain, you have the flexibility to apply them to other parts of your development process in new and innovative ways, such as seeing which features your users like best. Today, I'm highlighting one of my favorite creative uses: creating an A/B testing framework for React Native apps with the App Center services CodePush, Push, and Analytics. As a ref...
Guest Blog | A Mobile DevOps Retrospective, Part III: Measurement, the Last Mile
This is Part III in a special guest series from Greg Shackles, Principal Engineer at Olo. New to the series? Start here. In my last post, I shared how automation, one of DevOps’ key concepts, frees our team to solve real problems, and how it’s created a cross-team “culture of ownership.” Everyone—from our developers to our sales managers—is laser-focused on quality. Measurement is a big piece of the DevOps puzzle, central to continuous development and improvement. But, measurement is an ambiguous term. To help you get started, I’ll walk through how (and why) we (my team at Olo, where we...
Microsoft Connect 2017 Visual Studio App Center Round-Up
Last week’s Connect event was full of exciting announcements, demos, and technical sessions. From announcing the General Availability of Visual Studio App Center to showing you how to use the latest and greatest services to build better apps, we’re excited to help developers focus on what matters: shipping awesome apps on any platform. In case you weren’t able to join us, want to share your favorite session with a friend, or didn’t get to see all of the talks you wanted to watch, we've got you covered. You can watch (or re-watch!) all sessions on-demand here. Visual Studio App Center On-Demand Videos At-a-Gla...