App Center Blog
The latest news, updates and information for mobile developers using Visual Studio App Center
Latest posts
Private Preview for App Store Connect API support
App Center is introducing JSON Web Token based authorization to Apple Developer Connection. You no longer have to renew your connection every 30 days using credentials, 2FA, and App Specific Password. Additionally, you will be able to set access levels for the keys in the Apple Developer Portal. While App Center will continue supporting the session-based authorization, we encourage you to try out using App Store Connect API key. Find a host of new features and improvements in the App Store Connect API release notes for your internal development and testing. If you would like to try out App Store Connect API in...
Deprecating macOS 10.15 image in App Center Build
Microsoft-hosted Pipelines recently announced image deprecation in Azure Pipelines. Accordingly, we want to update App Center customers on the upcoming change in our build image support. If you are building iOS or Xamarin apps using , or or below versions, you will be impacted by this change. We recommend you update your build configuration to another Xcode or Xamarin version prior to October 2022. After this date, any build running on images will be re-routed to . Please reach out to support if you have any questions. We would be more than happy to assist you. Resources
Public Preview for App Center Build Export
App Center Build makes it easy for mobile developers to get started with building their apps - in many cases with just a few clicks. But this focus on simplicity also means that customers who need more complex builds end up outgrowing App Center Build and have a hard time figuring out where to go next. Whereas there are other tools in the broad Microsoft ecosystem to achieve that, there was no easy way to export App Center Build configurations and migrate them over to another tool. We are excited to introduce a new capability to migrate your existing App Center Build configurations over to Azure Pipelines. Now...
App Center Analytics & Diagnostics Data Retention
Mobile developers use App Center Analytics to gain insights into their applications’ users and their usage and use App Center Diagnostics to monitor their applications’ health and dig into unexpected failures. We are committed to keeping these services healthy and reliable, and as part of that we are making some changes to our data retention policies. Today, Analytics and Diagnostics data is retained for 90 days by default, with very few caps on the volume of data generated per application. This has led to unsustainably high data volumes across these two services. Today we are announcing a scaling back of the...
Deprecating macOS 10.14 image in App Center Build
Microsoft-hosted Pipelines recently announced image deprecation in Azure Pipelines. Accordingly, we want to update App Center customers on the upcoming change in our build image support. If you are building iOS or Xamarin apps using , , or or below versions, you will be impacted by this change. We recommend you update your build configuration to another Xcode or Xamarin version prior to December 2021. After this date, any build running on images will be re-routed to . Please reach out to support if you have any questions. We would be more than happy to assist you. Resources macOS-10.14 Image c...
Announcing Apache Cordova Retirement in App Center
Since App Center launched in 2017, we’ve added support for 16 platforms and frameworks. One of the first was Apache Cordova, a cross-platform framework that wraps JavaScript apps in a native container. Along with React Native, it was one of two frameworks to support CodePush and exactly what the community needed as many developers transitioned their skills from web to mobile apps. Since then, the needs of the community have changed just as Cordova’s popularity has waned. Today calls from the Cordova SDK account for less than 1% of App Center’s service. Consequently, after a 6 month grace period, App Center wil...
Run Tests on Android and iOS Beta Versions
We understand the pain and struggle to address unexpected issues before the next release of the major OS version. As exciting as it is to try new features in advance, the struggle to identify compatibility issues over a night is real. We heard your feedback, and now we are super excited to announce beta version support in App Center Test service. App Center Test Supports Beta Versions 🎉 Starting from today, App Center offers you a way to try pre-release versions of Android and iOS prior to the final release. You can try beta versions with your application in the physical devices, and test drive new features wi...
Deprecating Xcode version 11.0, 11.1, and 11.4 in App Center
![Ela Malani [MSFT]](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/85b217684cae99c4069b0139bf354be7?s=96&r=g){kind=avatar}
This September, Visual Studio App Center delivered build support for Xcode 11.7, 12.0, and 12.2 beta. In the process of expanding our Xcode support, we also investigated how many customers were using older versions. We discovered that our community currently builds between 2-4% of apps using Xcode 11.0,11.1 or 11.4. Therefore, we have decided to focus on supporting most commonly used Xcode versions. Effective November 5, 2020, we are ending support for Xcode versions 11.0, 11.1, and 11.4.We recommend you update your build configuration to another Xcode version prior to November 5, 2020. After this date, any bui...
Migrating off App Center Push
Retiring App Center Push Earlier this year, Microsoft announced the retirement of the preview MBaaS services in Visual Studio App Center, which include Auth, Data, and Push services. Today we’re providing an update on the App Center Push retirement timeline and details to help you migrate to Azure Notifications Hubs. We will retire App Center Push on February 15th, 2021 to give you sufficient time to migrate. We’re actively working on bringing the experience of App Center Push to Azure Notification Hubs as you migrate your apps. We have also released GA version of SDKs with the features below. Migrating to A...
Announcing MBaaS Service Retirement
![John Wargo [MSFT]](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/appcenter/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2019/02/user-1290-150x150.png){kind=avatar}
We are discontinuing efforts in the Auth, Data and Push services and working to retire these preview services in App Center. With this change, we will focus App Center on delivering a world-class mobile and desktop DevOps experience.
Updates to macOS Build Agents
![Nilofer Rajpurkar [MSFT]](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/appcenter/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/letter-avatar/3c48b97e9129347ff1785e7b86412184.svg){kind=avatar}
As apps move to build on the latest and greatest sets of build tools, we have seen a dwindling demand for building on High Sierra.
A Bite-Sized Daily Digest for Crashes in Visual Studio App Center
We’re excited to announce the launch of a daily digest for crashes in Visual Studio App Center! This bite-sized email gives you a single view of your daily activity of new crash groups.
HockeyApp is being retired
HockeyApp has officially retired.
HockeyApp Transition to Visual Studio App Center – October Update
Visual Studio App Center is still closing important feature gaps as HockeyApp is in the process of transitioning to App Center. See what we’ve been working on in October and learn more about what we’ve committed to on our roadmap.
October Updates for Visual Studio App Center’s Windows Support
This month, we’re excited to announce the General Availability support for WPF and WinForms applications, targeting both .NET Framework and .NET Core 3.
Securely Access, Visualize and Manage your Mobile App Data with Data Metrics View and Data Explorer capabilities in Visual Studio App Center
The App Center Data Explorer allows you to engage directly with and manage your data in the App Center portal. You have complete control over your Data. You can create, read, update, and delete documents directly in App Center. Previously, this was only available through the App Center Data client SDKs and the Azure portal.
HockeyApp Transition to Visual Studio App Center – September Update
Visual Studio App Center is closing important feature gaps as HockeyApp is transitioning to App Center later this year. See what we’ve been working on in September and learn more about what we’ve committed to on our road map.
Using the Android App Bundle with Visual Studio App Center
We’ve heard you loud and clear that being able to build and distribute AABs to supporting stores is important to you, and so we’re happy to announce that Visual Studio App Center supports building AABs for all supported Android platforms.
New Dark Theme Available on Visual Studio App Center
![Blanca Delgado Parra [MSFT]](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/a3aef4ca9bb301894723b72af10e7460?s=96&r=g){kind=avatar}
Thanks to you taking the time to request features via our Github repo, we are excited to announce that dark theme is available in App Center.
PLCrashReporter Maintainership Moving to Microsoft
We’re happy to announce that Microsoft is moving PLCrashReporter to the Microsoft organization on GitHub to continue supporting this valuable project. Of course, the licensing of PLCrashReporter won’t change and we are looking forward to continuing to support the project.
HockeyApp Transition to Visual Studio App Center – August Update
Visual Studio App Center is closing important feature gaps as HockeyApp is transitioning to App Center later this year. See what we’ve been working on in August and learn more about what we’ve committed to on our roadmap.
HockeyApp Transition to Visual Studio App Center July Update
App Center is closing important feature gaps as HockeyApp is transitioning to App Center later this year. See what we’ve been working on in July.
Announcing WPF and WinForms Support in Visual Studio App Center
Today, we’re excited to announce the preview release of the App Center WPF and Windows Forms SDK, enabling support for diagnostics, analytics and distribution for apps targeting .NET Framework.
Visual Studio App Center, User Identity, & Shared Devices
The user identity capabilities of App Center enhance how you interact with your app users and allow you to more easily troubleshoot issues when they arise We’ll continue to add capabilities to App Center to enhance what you can do for your app users,
Announcing GitLab Support for Visual Studio App Center
![Lyric Yu [MSFT]](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/appcenter/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/letter-avatar/33463123ae09f04f5c39094153a9bb90.svg){kind=avatar}
A first step to building your app is to select a source provider. As a crucial step in the build process, we are always hoping to make this as seamless as possible. To continue this mission, we are excited to announce the completion of our top feature request for the past few months - support for GitLab.com as a source provider!
Exploring the Visual Studio App Center Data Roadmap
App Center Data combines the mobile focus and “magic” of App Center with the scalability and power of Microsoft’s NoSQL database service known as Cosmos DB. You can completely control your data with the confidence it will always be available.
Expanding the Visual Studio App Center Network with OneSignal
Developers can now look to OneSignal for configuring an integration with App Center Analytics. OneSignal users can choose to send their analytics events to App Center, which delivers powerful querying tools to integrate events across your app and your infrastructure, with SQL-like querying.
JSON Web Token and React Native Support Arrives to Visual Studio App Center Auth
We shipped App Center Auth in early preview on May 7, and it’s been an exciting month and a half since our launch! During this time we’ve actively engaged with our developers and rolled out a couple of product improvements based on your feedback.
Three SDK Tips To Get More From Visual Studio App Center Analytics
In this post, I’m going to share how you can best leverage and utilize client-side APIs supported in the App Center SDK to have control and flexibility on storing, prioritizing, and sending the Analytics data to App Center backend.
App Center Build Adds Cloning of Existing Build Configurations
Over the course of the last few months, we have heard your feedback that you would love to use your existing configured branches as a basis for new build configurations. We’re excited to let you know that one of several improvements coming to our Visual Studio App Center Build service is the ability to clone build configurations from existing
Visual Studio App Center: Changing the Way you Handle App Data
Data. We’re aiming to solve some of the biggest problems associated with data. The App Center Data service, currently in preview, lets you manage, sync, and persist your application data in the cloud across different devices and platforms in both online and offline scenarios. Whether it’s global data that every user can see or private account
Moving from Node.js to .NET Core
Here on Visual Studio App Center, our platform is built as a set of microservices, which has afforded teams to make language and platform choices that work best for them, and ultimately allowed us to move and iterate quickly
Introducing Push to User for Visual Studio App Center
We made some recent changes to Visual Studio App Center that enable our customers to associate app users with their data in App Center. App Center customers can use this user association to send push notifications to specific users through App Center Push. In this article, I’ll explain how it all works.
Introducing Visual Studio App Center Auth
For the past few months, the team has been working to develop a seamless identity management service to easily manage user identities at scale in Visual Studio App Center. Today, we’re really excited to launch App Center Auth in early preview!
Visual Studio App Center Preview: Welcoming Auth and Data to the Portfolio
![James White [MSFT]](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/fe50459a0701d4f4a8016a9fdf948c38?s=96&r=g){kind=avatar}
App Center Data and Auth are available as an early preview, we will share more details in the next couple of weeks about what is available and what to expect in the future. In the meantime, we invite you to log into App Center, check out what is available today, and share your feedback.
Improvements to Visual Studio App Center Distribution
![Bo-ying Fu [MSFT]](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/appcenter/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/letter-avatar/16112f688d980e34deb64df304641a1a.svg){kind=avatar}
Earlier this year we started an effort for widespread customer outreach to understand our users and guide product prioritization. The effort helped us gain a lot of insight and helped our prioritization last quarter. However, as we continue to grow, we unfortunately don’t have the capacity to reach out to as many customers as we would like.
Faster Android Tests and NUnit 3
Xamarin.UITest is a popular C# testing framework which works great with both native and cross-platform apps, using frameworks like Xamarin. Today I’m happy to announce two updates we have made to the UITest framework, in the form of a performance boost for cloud tests and adding NUnit 3 support both locally and in the cloud.
Become a Dev Rockstar by Learning About your Users with Visual Studio App Center and Azure
App Center works seamlessly with Azure so you can export your user data to Azure and analyze it there to learn more about your users. Let’s first take a look at some real-world scenarios where customer data analyzed over a long period of time helps organizations provide better experiences for their customers.
Microsoft’s Developer Blogs are Getting an Update
In the coming days, we’ll be moving our developer blogs to a new platform with a modern, clean design and powerful features that will make it easy for you to discover and share great content. This week, you’ll see the Visual Studio, IoTDev, and Premier Developer blogs move to a new URL – while additional developer blogs will transition over the coming weeks. You’ll continue to receive all the information and news from our teams, including access to all past posts. Your RSS feeds will continue to seamlessly deliver posts and any of your bookmarked links will re-direct to the new URL location. We’d Love Your Feedb...
Growing the Visual Studio App Center Service Portfolio
There’s a lot you can do in your apps using App Center, but we also know our customers use other services in their apps as well. Successful apps typically identify users using a third-party identity service or the less popular username and password approach. These apps usually manage some sort of application data, whether it’s the user’s data shared across multiple devices or data shared across multiple users, groups, or even whole companies or divisions. Data in this context means structured or unstructured data as well as binary data such as files.
Introducing Diagnostics Search and User ID support
![Young Bu Park [MSFT]](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/e0c88c2eaa871deb91f10dc98e23b1c3?s=96&r=g){kind=avatar}
When releasing a new version of your app, you might get user complaints about crashes they’re experiencing in the new version. As a developer, you want to find the root cause as soon as possible to minimize the number of users affected. However, if you have millions of users, this could result in millions of crashes. Finding crashes would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Going Public (With Our Plans)
![John Wargo [MSFT]](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/88aa1aa4270cb12eaa4c9b8c51c13a41?s=96&r=g){kind=avatar}
Starting now, we’re opening the doors and letting all of you in, you now have a front row seat to our product planning process. Following the Visual Studio Code model, we published all our current product plans in the App Center GitHub repository.
Give Your Crashes a Context through Logs Attachments
This is a guest post by Jean-Marie Alfonsi, Freelance Software Architect. At the dawn of the app era, crash reporting was a dull and heavy work. You needed to manually retrieve your crash from your smartphone system, put some context in it and then send it to your custom web service. Being in the golden age of apps, we are now pretty spoiled with various ecosystems and continuous integration platforms, as they do all the heavy lifting for us. In terms of features and ease of use, Visual Studio App Center is one of the top players for app DevOps and is a must-have in a Xamarin environment. It does a tremendous ...
A New Year Ahead – the HockeyApp Cutover Experience
Starting today, you can get started with your transition from HockeyApp to App Center through the side-by-side experience. We’ll also update you with full documentation and details on completing your migration to App Center in March 2019 to enable all of our users to complete moving over all apps by November 16, 2019.
Creating Memories with Better DevOps for Unity Games in Visual Studio App Center
2018 has been a big year for Visual Studio App Center, with all the updates and releases. It has been especially exciting to work with the game developer community to provide better tailored services for your needs. Here are some of the highlights from 2018, mainly for Unity developers, as well as a glimpse into what we have in store going into the next year, for game developers in App Center. Beginning the Journey at GDC 2018 App Center’s gaming journey began at the Microsoft booth at the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in March of 2018. We knew developers had found success using HockeyA...
The Easy-to-Use and Modular App Center SDK
App Center supports a client SDK that is important to onboard to our services like Analytics, Diagnostics, and Push notifications. These SDKs are open source on GitHub, designed with a modular architecture, and easy-to-use APIs to make sure developers have an easy on-boarding experience. App Center supports a wide variety of SDK platforms - iOS, Android, macOS, DotNet, React Native, and Unity. This blog post covers most of the SDK features shipped by the App Center team this year.
Surging – Remote Teams Working Together in Person for a Week to Make Magic.
Visual Studio App Center has a globally distributed team. We have teams from South Korea, India, USA, Denmark and more. With our distributed nature, we have used all the electronic tools and processes we can to try and enable all of our team members to have a great working experiences and be highly productive, regardless of time zone or location. We use Microsoft Teams, Azure Boards and many more. We also record Teams meetings so that people in other time zones can review them later. With all that, we found that there were situations where we need to come together as a group and get specific projects done...
Visual Studio App Center’s GitHub App: The Ultimate Stocking Stuffer
Configuring CI from GitHub is just the beginning when it comes to App Center. Take your app lifecycle to the next level with automated UI testing on real devices and automated distribution to your beta testers, public groups, or directly to the store. App Center’s SDK puts important information such as crashes and usage at your fingertips. Continuously improve your app based off of real data to provide the best experience to your users.
Deck the Halls with an Improved Visual Studio App Center Portal UI
One of the things we've always wanted to tackle was making our web portal mobile-friendly. Working extensively with our designers, we were able to refresh the portal UI, update components for consistency and accessibility, as well as start the efforts on making the portal more mobile-friendly.
Visual Studio App Center CLI Customers – Event-Stream Package Security Update and Next Steps
On November 26, 2018 the npm security team removed `flatmap-stream` from the popular `event-stream@3.3.6` package. In late September, `flatmap-stream` had been added as a dependency by a GitHub developer identified as “right9control” in an apparent attempt to attack the `ps-tree` package running in copay, a cryptocurrency wallet.
The Ship List: Visual Studio App Center November Edition
It is hard to believe that it has been a full year since we announced the general availability of Visual Studio App Center. It has been an exciting year for our team as we have learned how you use App Center, listened to your feedback and shipped new features. App Center has come a long way in the past year, and we are excited to share with you some of our most recent updates to the product
Better Player Engagement with Push Notifications in Unity Apps
In the world of mobile development, the ability to send targeted push notifications is one of the tools available to developers to help connect with users. In games, a well-timed push notification can deepen player engagement and increase daily active sessions. Adding and supporting push notifications has become so common that it could be considered a requirement for any app built today. Today, the Visual Studio App Center team is happy to add Unity to our supported platforms for Push Notifications and excited to have you get started today. Engagement through Cross Platform Simplicity...
A Year in Visual Studio App Center Test
Our team is proud of what we brought you with Visual Studio App Center’s physical device testing service in 2018, which included greatly exceeding 3,000 physical devices in our lab, same-day operating system updates for iOS/Android, and seamless upgrades from Xamarin Test Cloud to App Center. If automated UI testing is not already part of your development pipeline, App Center can help. Log in or create your free App Center account to get started today! New Devices App Center is committed to providing access to cross-platform, multi-format devices, including the latest ...
Cheers to New CodePush Features
As we close out 2018, our team is still busy delivering useful new additions to Visual Studio App Center for you. Today, I’ll be highlighting the addition of three all-new CodePush features: Install Metrics and Update Metadata in the App Center CLI, Deployment Management in the App Center Portal, and our re-try mechanism for CodePush rollbacks. All three of these features were heavily requested by you in the community, bringing a better experience to React Native developers end-to-end and ultimately make distributing releases via CodePush a more polished process for you. Here’s more information...
HockeyApp’s Exciting Future in Visual Studio App Center
Over the last month, we’ve been excited to welcome thousands of new HockeyApp customers to Visual Studio App Center. As you may have read, last month we shared that HockeyApp will fully transition to App Center on November 16, 2019. Over this coming year, HockeyApp customers will discover all the benefits of App Center: the next generation of HockeyApp's distribution, crash reporting and analytics services, as well as powerful new services and features exclusive to App Center. Get Started with your Transition Today As a HockeyApp customer it’s easy to get started wit...
A New Year Ahead – the HockeyApp Cutover Experience
In 2017, we announced that HockeyApp features and functionality would move to Visual Studio App Center, a single solution for continuously build ing, testing, releasing, and monitoring your apps and recently shared that HockeyApp will fully transition to App Center on November 16, 2019. In order to deliver a seamless experience to developers, our team conducted many customer interviews and worked across various teams to ensure that we understood our users’ needs. Personally, one of the aspects that I enjoy most as a Product Manager is speaking with our users! We are very thankful for your continu...
Creating Memories with Better DevOps for Unity Games in Visual Studio App Center
2018 has been a big year for Visual Studio App Center, with all the updates and releases. It has been especially exciting to work with the game developer community to provide better-tailored services for your needs. Here are some of the highlights from 2018, mainly for Unity developers, as well as a glimpse into what we have in store going into the next year, for game developers in App Center. Beginning the Journey at GDC 2018 App Center’s gaming journey began at the Microsoft booth at the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in March of 2018. We knew developers had found success using HockeyApp,...
The Easy-to-Use and Modular App Center SDK
App Center supports a client SDK that is important to onboard to our services like Analytics, Diagnostics, and Push notifications. These SDKs are open source on GitHub, designed with a modular architecture, and easy-to-use APIs to make sure developers have an easy on-boarding experience. App Center supports a wide variety of SDK platforms - iOS, Android, macOS, DotNet, React Native, and Unity. This blog post covers most of the SDK features shipped by the App Center team this year. A few key features supported in the SDK: Some of these features are available only for select platforms – iOS, Android and Un...
Surging – Remote Teams Working Together in Person for a Week to Make Magic.
Visual Studio App Center has a globally distributed team. We have teams from South Korea, India, USA, Denmark and more. With our distributed nature, we have used all the electronic tools and processes we can to try and enable all of our team members to have a great working experiences and be highly productive, regardless of time zone or location. We use Microsoft Teams, Azure Boards and many more. We also record Teams meetings so that people in other time zones can review them later. With all that, we found that there were situations where we need to come together as a group and get specific projects done on a...
Visual Studio App Center’s GitHub App: The Ultimate Stocking Stuffer
It has been a big year for both Visual Studio App Center and GitHub. Best of all was some of the work we did together! Earlier this year, App Center brought to you the Visual Studio App Center app in the GitHub Marketplace. GitHub users can take advantage of a tailored continuous integration (CI) solution for mobile apps directly from GitHub. A Magical Start We believe in making mobile development easier. So easy that we brought the experience to you in the workflow you are already used to. Simply open a pull request in a repository with a mobile project, and see the App Center GitHub Marketplace app automatical...
Deck the Halls with an Improved Visual Studio App Center Portal UI
As we’re wrapping up 2018 here at Visual Studio App Center, our team is proud of the new features and functionality we’ve been able to deliver to you this year. Over the next two weeks, we want to share some improvements we’ve been doing behind the scenes, along with some new and exciting changes for 2019. I often hear customers commenting on how great App Center looks. We take pride in our design-first mindset, but as our design language evolves, and as we focus on different parts of the product, sometimes we have to take a step back and evaluate the user experience as a whole. One of the things we've always ...
Visual Studio App Center CLI Customers – Event-Stream Package Security Update and Next Steps
On Nov 26, 2018, the npm security team removed `flatmap-stream` from the popular `event-stream@3.3.6` package. In late September, `flatmap-stream` had been added as a dependency by a GitHub developer identified as “right9control” in an apparent attempt to attack the `ps-tree` package running in copay, a cryptocurrency wallet. You can read about the timeline of events and more details in this NPM blog post and corresponding GitHub issue. Some recent versions of the Visual Studio App Center CLI included the compromised version of the event-stream package, however users were not impacted as the CLI does not includ...
Announcing iOS App Extension and watchOS Support in Visual Studio App Center
Whether you want to add a widget to the Today screen, create new photo editing tools directly in the Camera app, or bring your app to the Apple Watch, App Center is excited to continue enabling developers to create amazing mobile experiences.
Thanks, HockeyApp. Visual Studio App Center Will Take It From Here
Reposted from the HockeyApp blog. One year ago, we announced Visual Studio App Center as the future of HockeyApp. During this journey we listened to you and have continued to improve App Center in every way. We started out with the next generation of your favorite HockeyApp services: distribution, crash reporting and analytics, and added new services exclusive to App Center: Build, Test and Push Notifications. But we didn’t stop there. We continued to build new features that make you even more productive. Today, after months of work and refinement, we are announcing that HockeyApp will complete its transiti...
Announcing the General Availability of App Center Diagnostics
We have been working hard to improve App Center Diagnostics, making it more robust, performant, and scalable. From your feedback we are also bringing you a consolidated UI, combining crashes and errors in one view, as well as introducing a more intuitive symbol upload experience. With these changes, we are happy to announce Diagnostics is a Generally Available Service and no longer in preview
Visual Studio App Center Unity Editor Extension- A Better Unity Experience
Just a few weeks ago, we shipped our Unity SDK and support for Unity in Visual Studio App Center portal. We have been excited to see the reception so far, seeing many new Unity apps created using App Center. To help integrate more seamlessly into the tools you are already using, and make the experience better, the App Center team is happy to announce the release of the App Center Unity Editor Extension.
Xcode 8.0-8.3.2 Deprecation in Visual Studio App Center
This September, Visual Studio App Center delivered same-day build support for Xcode 10. As our community builds fewer than 1 percent of apps with older versions of Xcode 8, we will focus on supporting Xcode 8.3.3 and higher. Effective November 28, 2018, we are ending support for older versions of Xcode, including 8.0, 8.1, 8.2, 8.2.1, 8.3.1 and 8.3.2.
Visual Studio App Center Levels Up with Unity Support
Unity is one of the most popular and recognized game development platforms on the market to date. Microsoft has had a long-standing partnership with Unity, with Visual Studio Tools for Unity being the default installed editor experience for Unity developers around the world. Continuing in our quest to make mobile developers more productive, and better support the apps developers are building, the Visual Studio App Center team is excited to announce the public release of the App Center Unity SDK.
Visual Studio App Center: A New But Familiar Upgrade for HockeyApp Customers
App Center is the next generation of HockeyApp, and there’s a lot of reasons to start using App Center today. All your existing HockeyApp data and configurations are already available to you in App Center, so you can start exploring today.
Testing Xamarin Applications with Visual Studio App Center
With App Center you can perform both unit tests and automated UI tests within a CI/CD pipeline. You should launch your unit tests on a post-clone step and UI-tests on post-build step. While planning your UI test strategy (how many testing devices, how many tests, and how often to perform them) you should consider that UI testing requires more time than unit testing.
The Ship List: Visual Studio App Center September Edition
Like many of you, we were excited to learn about the latest mobile software and hardware updates coming to both consumers as well as developers. We have also spent time continuing to ship even more improvements to the app distribution experience. With that said, let us dive right in to the latest releases from App Center that you can use today.
Automatically Protect Your App with Visual Studio App Center and Intune
Today, we are announcing the Intune MAM Wrapper for line of business apps is now available for iOS in beta. Admins and security persons can now turn on data protection with organization-wide policies, which also benefits LOB app developers as they can release MAM-ware apps to the Intune store. After publishing the application to Intune, the admin can apply company-required policies via the Intune blade in the Azure portal.
Scaling Your Distribution Workflow with Shared Groups and AAD support
Both shared groups and AAD support are features that empower you to build great apps, with the included bonus of not worrying about how you will manage each and every one of your testers. Both features can play a big role in making beta distribution and tester management a more scalable practice.
Announcing Extension-less XCUITest Support in Visual Studio App Center Test for iOS 12
Each year Apple releases a new version of iOS and the App Center team works tirelessly to support it in our device lab. Keeping this tradition App Center is pleased to announce launch day support for iOS 12 in App Center.
The Ship List: App Center August Update
The Visual Studios App Center team has been hard at work, continuing to ship new features and improvements to App Center this summer. Here are some of the newest offerings to come from the App Center team over the last month.
Mobile CI/CD 101
The mobile CI/CD approach allows you to simplify and accelerate the process of creating a quality product. Cloud Mobile CI/CD pipeline based on App Center allows to “configure-and-forget” environment for build, test and distribute. In this article we explained mobile development pitfalls and how to avoid them with automation.
Top 5 Mobile App Security Failures and How To Prevent Them
All developers must take into consideration functionality, user experience and security when they build and update their mobile apps. These issues are not insurmountable and can be addressed by increasing a focus on secure mobile development best practices with developer training resources, improved security hygiene and the addition of automated security testing approach into the dev pipeline to establish a strong security baseline.
Visual Studio App Center Test: Android 9 Pie Support, 3000+ Real Devices, Improved Test Notifications and More
We are excited to announce App Center has same-day Test framework and device support for Android P. If automated UI testing is not already part of your development pipeline, App Center can help.
VIDEO: Continuous Integration and Delivery Cloud Services for iOS and Android
App Center is a modular platform that lets you pick and choose the services you need to continuously build, test, release and monitor apps for Android, iOS, macOS, really whatever platform you choose.
Publish Enterprise Apps with Visual Studio App Center and Intune
Publishing and distributing line of business apps in an enterprise, can be challenging for both developers and admins. Developers often use custom build tools, manually test across multiple devices and upload apps to an internal company site for distribution. Microsoft Intune offers the company portal for simple and secure distribution of apps within an enterprise. Publishing apps to the company portal could involve custom solutions using Intune API’s or sending app packages to an IT admin within the company, who uploads the apps to the company portal via the Intune blade on the Azure portal. Visual Studio App...
Visual Studio App Center and GDPR
On the Visual Studio App Center team, our engineers are completely aligned with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which gives consumers better and more explicit control of data – especially their personal data.
Feature Flags Give Crash Reporting a Serious Boost
Integrating feature flags with your App Center crash service allows you to reduce the impact of crashes. Such an integration makes investigating crashes quicker and easier and allows for almost immediate rollback of problematic features.
Improved App Distribution is Here: Redesigned Tester Experience, Distribution Statistics, and More
Getting your release installed on a user’s device is the most important part of the distribution process. We've been working on incremental improvements to our tester experience since launching App Center in 2017, but after months of interviews and feedback from hundreds of customers, we’ve completely overhauled the user experience and visual design for our tester install portal.
Visual UI Testing for Android Apps with Espresso and Visual Studio App Center
This is a guest post from Daniel Puterman, engineering lead at Applitools. Suppose you’ve built a new Android app and want to build some visual test automation scripts to ensure that it appears correctly on the devices it might run on. Not all the Android devices out there — just the top 20 for now. Suppose further that your app isn’t all that complex; just ten screens, with an average of ten visual elements each. And you won’t check every last attribute of those visual elements, just five: x, y position, height, width, and text. Simple, right? Unfortunately, no. If you apply traditional functional testing ...
Export To Application Insights With AppCenter Continuous Export
Five-star mobile apps have one special feature: they don’t let go of their users. This can be achieved by understanding your app, the app’s users, and how these users interact with your app. The deep customer insights offered by AppCenter's Continuous Export provide a better understanding of your customers and help boost retention. By default, you receive information about your active users, their active sessions, top devices, country, language, and more! Additionally, with just a few lines of code, you can also track custom events like user log-in or items added to a cart but not purchase. This post will look i...
From Code to Google Play: Release your Apps Automatically with Continuous Delivery
We are embracing a world where thermostats automatically adjust and sprinklers automatically water, why shouldn’t your releases be automated? Continuous delivery is a natural extension of continuous integration. It allows you to develop faster, collect feedback earlier, and ultimately produce happier customers. We have received feedback from numerous customers asking for the capability of releasing a build directly to the store. We introduced the ability to automate the process to release your app directly to app stores for successful builds, without the need to do any manual work. You don’t need to worry abou...
The Ship List: Visual Studio App Center June Update
Intro With June closing out, we also come to the end of the industry’s spring conference schedule. After multiple developer events around the world we have a vision of the future of mobile and the exciting new things to come. We joined many of you in the developer community at AltConf and, along with it, had a couple of new updates to share. Without further ado, let us dive in to what is new for Visual Studio App Center: auto-provision devices for distribution, automatic publishing of your iOS and Android app builds to the store, and free training resources for iOS developers. Auto-Provision iOS Devices for Fa...
Distribute Android Apps Faster with Visual Studio App Center
Whether you’re working on an early proof of concept, or a beta of an Android app used by hundreds of millions of people around the world, the ability to get your app in the hands of testers is a critical part of the product development cycle. Being able to quickly iterate, distribute, measure, and learn is the best way to create a great app your users love. Staying in the know about crashes in your app and being able to collect feedback on what your users do and don’t like is equally important to the success of your app. In this post you learn about the new improvement of our distribution feature and how you can ...
iOS Development Course: Learn How to Automate Your iOS Development Lifecycle
Course co-authors, Adrian Stevens and Mark Taparauskas, also contributed to this blog post. Building great Objective-C and Swift apps that your customers can rely on takes time and effort. It's important to test early (and often) to verify new code works as expected and doesn't accidently break existing features. Once your users have your app, you want to ensure it runs well and that your users enjoy your exciting new features. Visual Studio App Center makes it easy to automate builds and run tests every time your code changes. It also simplifies distribution to testers during development and to the App Store ...
Announcing Auto-Provisioning: Build and Distribute Apps Faster
Getting your app onto your own device, or in the hands of potential testers, can be one of the most time-consuming challenges when developing an iOS app. To install an app on a single device, you must register the device with Apple and sign the app with the relevant provisioning profile. While this isn’t much of an issue for a single device, you need to register and re-sign the app each time you install the app on a new set of devices. For a developer, this repetitive action is a huge loss of time; for a tester, it’s a disruptive experience to receive an app and not be able to install it because your device hasn’...
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...
Open for Feedback: Contribute Directly to Visual Studio App Center Product Documentation
To ensure Visual Studio App Center is as easy as possible to use, we've created a more direct feedback channel for building and publishing product documentation based on the great feedback we receive from you, our users. Open sourcing our product documentation is a natural extension of our App Center philosophy, which is open API, open source SDKs, and an open source CLI. Our public document repository also enables us to integrate with a feedback system based on GitHub issues. Providing Feedback If you have product feedback or questions for us, including how to use or configure an App Center capability, click...
App Center Errors: Monitoring and Keeping Your Xamarin Apps Healthy
Building and shipping a successful app is a challenge. Monitoring and keeping your app healthy is even more challenging and time-consuming. Once you ship your app into the wild, unexpected errors often occur as real users start engaging with it; staying on top of them is crucial to the success of your app and business. As a developer, you need to have insight into the cause of these issues and how frequently they're happening. Visual Studio App Center recently shipped a feature that gives you just that awareness. We're excited to announce the release of the Errors feature for iOS and Android apps built using...
App Center Errors: Monitoring and Keeping Your Xamarin Apps Healthy
Building and shipping a successful app is a challenge. Monitoring and keeping your app healthy is even more challenging and time-consuming. Once you ship your app into the wild, unexpected errors often occur as real users start engaging with it; staying on top of them is crucial to the success of your app and business. As a developer, you need to have insight into the cause of these issues and how frequently they're happening. Visual Studio App Center recently shipped a feature that gives you just that awareness. We're excited to announce the release of the Errors feature for iOS and Android apps built using...
How (and Why) We Built Our New Visual Studio App Center Tester Apps: Preview Now Available!
We’re excited to announce that HockeyApp for App Center, our native iOS and Android apps, are now available! HockeyApp for App Center brings the functionality of the App Center install website to a native app experience, making it even easier for you and your beta testers to get the latest and greatest builds as soon as they’re available. We call the app "HockeyApp" because we want to welcome our HockeyApp users to using this app; all the apps you distribute through HockeyApp are also visible and downloadable with this app! Why You, Your Team, and Your Users Will Love HockeyApp for App Center The native apps ...
How (and Why) We Built Our New Visual Studio App Center Tester Apps: Preview Now Available!
We’re excited to announce that HockeyApp for App Center, our native iOS and Android apps, are now available! HockeyApp for App Center brings the functionality of the App Center install website to a native app experience, making it even easier for you and your beta testers to get the latest and greatest builds as soon as they’re available. We call the app "HockeyApp" because we want to welcome our HockeyApp users to using this app; all the apps you distribute through HockeyApp are also visible and downloadable with this app! Why You, Your Team, and Your Users Will Love HockeyApp for App Center The native apps ...
Visual Studio App Center: A Year in Review
The last year has been great! We celebrated the launch of App Center, and since then the team has been improving the product and building new features. You told us that modern Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery service needs to be easy to set up, support multiple platforms, and be extensible. We listened and today provide a service that’s reliable, platform agnostic, easy to use, and modular so you can automate your app development pipeline and focus on coding awesome features. To commemorate 2017, we thought we'd review a few of our favorite features and customer support stats for the year. We Ann...
How “Mono-repo” and “One Infra” Help Us Deliver a Better Developer Experience
As a team, from Visual Studio App Center engineers to product managers, designers, and QA, our goal is simple: build an amazing product for developers. We decided early on that to help our team deliver on our goal, we’d create a set of values that would guide our decisions and keep us on the right path as we add new features, prioritize enhancements to services, or build integrations. We wanted these values to drive not just the product, but our team culture, and after many discussions, we established four core values: customer obsession, simplicity, no silos, and growth mindset. As an Engineering Manager, I’m ...
Three Quick Tips: Signing Your iOS Apps with Visual Studio App Center Build
Once you start building your apps in Visual Studio App Center, you need to get them to your testers and ultimately to your users, which requires you to sign your apps. Dealing with provisioning profiles and certificates can sometimes be a challenging process. Several developers have asked about setting up iOS app signing with App Center, so we've gathered our favorite tips to help you successfully sign your iOS apps, whether for testing or the App Store. 1. Save the build configuration in App Center after you've pushed signing changes to your project In App Center, the build configuration of any branch st...
Guest Blog | Solving “What the Bug?” with the Visual Studio App Center Crashes Service
This is a special guest post from Miguel Cervantes, CTO at Payit. It’s every developer’s nightmare: something goes wrong with your app in the wild, with real users, or, even worse, when you’re showing it to a venture capitalist, potential client, or at public event. In the moment, we usually have no idea what’s happened or how we can fix it. I call these, “what the bug?” moments. Finding a bug in development isn’t easy, but we use automated UI testing on real devices to catch as much as possible at Payit so we can release with confidence (thanks, App Center Test service!). But, once you ship, all bets a...
Looking for Buddybuild Alternatives? Try App Center
With Buddybuild dropping Android support in March, we'd love for you to explore Visual Studio App Center as an option for your new home if you're one of the many Android developers searching for an alternative cloud-based Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) service. Built for all developers and backed by Microsoft, we have a solid Android, iOS, and React Native CI/CD solution to help you get up and running quickly, allowing you to focus on what's most important: creating great app experiences. Why App Center is the Right Choice for You App Center provides support for Android, iOS, React Nativ...
Boosting Productivity, Quality, and ROI with Automated CI / CD
Mobile development moves fast, and it’s hard to stay on top of your game without losing productivity. From Machine Learning to Computer Vision to whatever else comes next, mobile developers are expected to learn and implement emerging technologies as they arrive, without missing a deadline. To make that work, you need to claw back time. In my years of experience as an enterprise mobile app developer, the best way I’ve found to do that is by automating CI/CD. During my time at Xamarin and Microsoft, I’ve watched a myriad of companies reach the same conclusion. In this post, I’ll share some of those stories that...
Continuous Quality: Ship Better Apps Faster with Visual Studio App Center
Think about one of your mobile apps... How often do you publish updates to it? A couple of times per year? Quarterly? Monthly, bi-weekly? Every day? Multiple times per day? No! That's crazy, right? Or is it? Some world-class app engineering teams are able to consistently release their apps weekly or every two weeks at high quality. How do they manage to do that? Part of the explanation is commitment to a continuous delivery process in some form. Let’s look at some of the benefits and challenges of continuous delivery, and, more importantly, why this is accessible to everyone. You don’t need to be a venture-back...
Continuous Quality: Ship Better Apps Faster with Visual Studio App Center
Think about one of your mobile apps... How often do you publish updates to it? A couple of times per year? Quarterly? Monthly, bi-weekly? Every day? Multiple times per day? No! That's crazy, right? Or is it? Some world-class app engineering teams are able to consistently release their apps weekly or every two weeks at high quality. How do they manage to do that? Part of the explanation is commitment to a continuous delivery process in some form. Let’s look at some of the benefits and challenges of continuous delivery, and, more importantly, why this is accessible to everyone. You don’t need to be a venture-back...
Customer Spotlight | How Quora Empowers Its Developers to Make an Impact
With over 200 million monthly visitors (and growing), Quora is a platform that enables people from around the world to learn and share knowledge across millions of topics and interests. The company focuses on rapid iteration to create a high-quality user experience, and their development team’s advanced deployment processes are critical to their continued success. They’ve kept their development team extremely lean as they’ve grown over the last eight years, guided by three key principles: With hundreds of daily releases across platforms, continuous automated testing is uniquely important. Visual Studi...
Customer Spotlight | How Quora Empowers Its Developers to Make an Impact
With over 200 million monthly visitors (and growing), Quora is a platform that enables people from around the world to learn and share knowledge across millions of topics and interests. The company focuses on rapid iteration to create a high-quality user experience, and their development team’s advanced deployment processes are critical to their continued success. They’ve kept their development team extremely lean as they’ve grown over the last eight years, guided by three key principles: With hundreds of daily releases across platforms, continuous automated testing is uniquely important. Visu...
Guest Blog | The What, Why, and How of App Store Optimization: Lessons from the Ground
This is a special guest post from David Drobik, co-founder at Rapid and business development lead for STRV. If you’re anything like me, you might remember the good old days of mobile app development: you designed, coded, submitted to the Apple App Store or the Android Market (way back in the time, before it was Google Play), and downloads came your way. Maybe it wasn’t easy, exactly, and still required hard work, high quality code, and thoughtful marketing, but it was nothing compared to now. In 2018, the mobile app game requires equal parts amazing UX, fast release cycles, and a strategic approach to g...
The Ship List: App Center January Update
The New Year represents an exciting time for those of us on the App Center team, after our launch last November at Connect(); and seeing your initial reactions over the past few months. We haven't rested after the launch, however. We have been hard at work improving App Center, listening to your feedback, and looking at how we want the product to evolve in the future. Without further ado, here are the new features you'll find in App Center that have shipped since GA. Test on the Latest iPhone and Android Devices Last fall brought with it not only the launch of App Center, but a new wave of flagship devices, su...
The What, Why, and How of Mobile DevOps with Visual Studio App Center
With constant operating system releases, ever-shifting user expectations, and new form factors launching every year, making sure your apps are high-quality, take advantage of the latest technology, and deliver features that win users’ loyalty can feel like multiple full-time jobs. The solution: mobile DevOps and automation, so you’re freed to focus on building new features and improving your users’ experience, not manual processes. Enter Visual Studio App Center, which brings all the cloud-hosted services you need to simplify and automate your Android, iOS, UWP, and macOS development pipeline into one easy-to-us...
Upcoming Webinar | Xamarin University Presents: Ship Better Apps with Visual Studio App Center
In my role as a Program Manager for Xamarin University, my team and I have helped thousands of developers get hands-on to learn how to build better native Android, iOS, UWP, and connected device apps using C# and Visual Studio Tools for Xamarin. Now I'd like to invite you to join me for Xamarin University Presents: Ship Better Apps with Visual Studio App Center on Thursday, January 25th at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 5pm UTC to see how Visual Studio App Center makes it easy for any developer (at any experience level) to continuously build, test, distribute, and monitor apps written in any language. I’ll focus on a few...
Upcoming Webinar | Xamarin University Presents: Ship Better Apps with Visual Studio App Center
In my role as a Program Manager for Xamarin University, my team and I have helped thousands of developers get hands-on to learn how to build better native Android, iOS, UWP, and connected device apps using C# and Visual Studio Tools for Xamarin. Now I'd like to invite you to join me for Xamarin University Presents: Ship Better Apps with Visual Studio App Center on Thursday, January 25th at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 5pm UTC to see how Visual Studio App Center makes it easy for any developer (at any experience level) to continuously build, test, distribute, and monitor apps written in any language. I’ll focus on a few...
Deliver Lightning Fast Updates to your Users with CodePush: A Beginner’s Guide
As app developers, we move fast, whether we're working on code, testing, validating, shipping, or iterating. Delivering critical bug fixes and minor features to your users quickly means the difference between a great user experience and a lackluster one, or, put more simply, the difference between a happy user and one who deletes your app. Bugs and errors are unavoidable elements of programming that we all know too well. Because of this, updates and patches serve as the crutch of development. In mobile development, though, updates and patches aren’t immediate. You spend time re-building and re-packaging fo...
Deliver Lightning Fast Updates to your Users with CodePush: A Beginner’s Guide
As app developers, we move fast, whether we're working on code, testing, validating, shipping, or iterating. Delivering critical bug fixes and minor features to your users quickly means the difference between a great user experience and a lackluster one, or, put more simply, the difference between a happy user and one who deletes your app. Bugs and errors are unavoidable elements of programming that we all know too well. Because of this, updates and patches serve as the crutch of development. In mobile development, though, updates and patches aren’t immediate. You spend time re-building and re-packaging fo...
Guest Blog | Your Guide to Getting Feedback Fast and Building Better Apps
This is a special guest post from Marco Kuiper, Consultant at Info Support and blogger at Marcofolio.net. Many developers are good at building things right, but far fewer are skilled at building the right thing. While you need a strong idea of what problem you’re solving for your users (and why and how), you can’t rely on vision and gut feeling alone. Gathering insights and feedback from your users is critical to winning their loyalty, as well as to your long-term success and profitability as an app developer. In my work as a professional developer, I’ve learned how to couple quantitative information wit...
Guest Blog | Your Guide to Getting Feedback Fast and Building Better Apps
This is a special guest post from Marco Kuiper, Consultant at Info Support and blogger at Marcofolio.net. Many developers are good at building things right, but far fewer are skilled at building the right thing. While you need a strong idea of what problem you’re solving for your users (and why and how), you can’t rely on vision and gut feeling alone. Gathering insights and feedback from your users is critical to winning their loyalty, as well as to your long-term success and profitability as an app developer. In my work as a professional developer, I’ve learned how to couple quantitative information wit...
Better Decisions Through Better Analytics: Visual Studio App Center with Azure Application Insights
To properly manage your development pipeline and product strategy, you first need understand your users and how they interact with your apps. Visual Studio App Center Analytics offers free, glanceable, out-of-the-box analytics to get anyone started, and simple integration with Azure Application Insights gives even the most data-hungry business the deep insights they need. In this post, you'll learn how you can use App Center Analytics and Application Insights together to help you make decisions in your app. With a simple SDK integration and setup, you get robust analytics and data that provide the immediate fe...
Build Any App with Visual Studio App Center
At Microsoft, we strive to deliver the best developer tools on the planet in order to help make all developers more productive. With Visual Studio App Center, you can easily automate your DevOps lifecycle to continuously build, test, release, and monitor your apps on every platform, so you have more time to focus on your users and their experience. The App Center Build service is completely free for your first 240 build minutes per month (up to 30 minutes per build) and supports iOS, macOS, Windows, and, of course, Android apps. App Center supports apps written in Obj-C, Swift, Java, React Native, and Xamar...
Top 12 Visual Studio App Center Tips and Tricks of 2017
2017 was a big year for us and Visual Studio App Center, from announcing our General Availability to expanding to even more platforms and services. We’re excited for an amazing 2018, as we help you, and app developers everywhere, build better apps. Our goal is to create an amazing developer experience, so you can stay 100% focused on creating amazing experiences for your users. As we’ve continued to iterate, collected your feedback, and released new features, we’ve created a few blog posts and videos to make it even easier to start simplifying and automating your development pipeline. Over the holiday season, we...
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...
How We Build SDKs Developers Love
We—the Visual Studio App Center development team—have released SDKs for Android, iOS, React Native, UWP and Xamarin, with more in the works. As we build new tools, we do so knowing that many are successors to popular SDKs, like HockeyApp, that developers already use and love (for good reason). When we started working on App Center, we knew we had to not only build new, exciting features, but take the existing SDKs’ hard-earned developer satisfaction into account. We’ve learned a lot along the way (and continue to learn!), and we’re sharing our story today to help you build your own amazing SDKs that your team, f...
Introducing App Center: Build, Test, Distribute and Monitor Apps in the Cloud
Today, we launched Visual Studio App Center1, and it is now generally available for Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows apps. App Center has everything you need to manage the lifecycle of your apps, including automated builds, testing on real devices in the cloud, distribution to beta testers and app stores, and monitoring of real-world usage through crash and analytics data. Apps written in Objective-C, Swift, Java, C#, Xamarin, and React Native are supported across all features. Use App Center to release more frequently, with higher quality, and have more time to spend on coding features instead of managing overh...
Everything at Microsoft Connect(); for the Visual Studio App Center Developer
Microsoft Connect (); kicked off this morning, with tons of announcements and demos, including the General Availability of Visual Studio App Center! There’s still a lot of great content to come over the next few days, so to help you hone in on what matters most for you, check out the round up below featuring all things mobile, DevOps, and cloud services. Set your calendar reminders, tune in, and get everything you need to ship faster, add the latest cloud services, and create amazing user experiences for any platform. Session list (note: all times are ET): Wednesday, November 15 | Keynotes & General Sessio...
Visual Studio App Center: The Next Generation of Xamarin Test Cloud
Today at Microsoft Connect(); we announced the launch of Visual Studio App Center, the next generation of Xamarin Test Cloud. App Center brings the power of Xamarin Test Cloud combined with ability to build, distribute, monitor and integrate push notifications- all in one place. Get all the features you use and love today in Xamarin Test Cloud combined with services you need to ship quality apps faster. What's Next with Xamarin Test Cloud We know it’s important to deliver the highest quality experience on the latest platforms which is why App Center Test offers thousands of physical devices for you to deploy y...
Guest Blog | A Mobile DevOps Retrospective Part II: Automation
Visual Studio Mobile Center is now Visual Studio App Center. Learn more here. This is Part II in a special guest series from Greg Shackles, Principal Engineer at Olo. New to the series? Start here. As I wrote in my last post, DevOps is (1) more than tooling, (2) crucial to mobile app development, (3) rarely done, and (4) worth it. Today, I’ll dig deeper into one of DevOps’ core concepts and something all developers are intimately familiar with: automation. I’ll walk through how we’ve automated our process at Olo (where we build restaurant ordering apps for 150+ brands), give you some real-world implement...
Introducing the App Center Slack App
Visual Studio Mobile Center is now Visual Studio App Center. Learn more here. I’m Amanda, and I’m passionate about optimization, making processes more efficient, and building apps that improve the world. I'm always looking for ways to save time, whether it’s in personal projects or in my work as a App Center Program Manager, where I spend my days building technology that helps developers deliver better apps faster. My favorite recent project and ultimate time-saver is the App Center Slack App. Our goal at App Center is to empower developers, bringing our tools to you in ways that fit into the way you work...
The Ship List: Mobile Center October Update
Visual Studio Mobile Center is now Visual Studio App Center. Learn more here. The Mobile Center team has been hard at work adding new functionality and improving existing services. If you attended or watched the Microsoft Ignite live stream, you've heard about some of our exciting updates including build scripts, export of analytics data to Azure Application Insights, UI testing support for Android Oreo and iOS 11, better in-app notifications for new releases, and code signing for React Native apps. If you missed it or got too caught up in the excitement, this post will cover some of the coolest ...
How to Build Better Apps with Xcode 9 and iOS 11
Visual Studio Mobile Center is now Visual Studio App Center. Learn more here. Apple’s official release of iOS 11 is packed with a smorgasbord of tasty morsels for users and developers. To help you dive in and get the most from iOS 11 and Xcode 9, I’m highlighting my favorite new features and how they—like Mobile Center—free you to build better apps faster. Code and Debug, but Better Historically, refactoring has been one of Xcode’s weak spots. As with drive-thru fast food, it did the job but left much to be desired. Like many other developers, I’ve mitigated this by “dining elsewhere”: using JetBrains’ Ap...
How We Do Code Review
Visual Studio Mobile Center is now Visual Studio App Center. Learn more here. The Mobile Center team is a diverse mix of engineers, product managers, and UI/UX designers with varying professional backgrounds, experience, and countries of origin. Our team has people from over 10 countries working across 8 time zones. Some are fresh out of college, while others have been in the industry for more than 20 years, and we all came in with our own understanding and definition of “code review.” We spend a significant part of our day doing code review in GitHub and Visual Studio Team Services, so we welcome anythin...