Continuing our investment in Visual C++ cross-platform mobile, starting with VS2015 RC (download here) we are pleased to announce support for building iOS applications using Visual Studio. Our iOS targeting story is definitely work in progress, and this feature enablement shares our current line of thinking. Over the next few releases we will be focusing on ironing out our iOS targeting story but for now to try out our iOS experience follow this MSDN article!

In addition to our recent platform enablement for iOS we have also added a wide range of features our Android and cross-platform mobile developers as well. Developers targeting the Android platform will now be able to take advantage of the following feature set:

• Android developers can now target Android API Level 21 (Android  5.0, Lollipop) and also leverage the more recent NDK (NDK R10D).
• GCC tool chain (GCC 4.8) for Android native development is now supported in Visual Studio. This is in addition to the Clang tool chain when building Android Native Libraries. Developers can configure the toolset to build their application using the General (Platform Toolset) property in property pages as depicted in the figure below.

  

• The Visual C++ toolchain will also now allow developers to take advantage of ‘Stripped Debugging’, this will allow developers to strip debug information from the binaries before deployment while still allowing them to debug the binary successfully. The feature can be controlled by use of the linker (Debugging) property page as shown in the figure below.

  

             

• We have made fixes to our debug an existing Android Application built externally to VS, you can find more information on this related blog-post.
   
• Debugger Visualizations (NATVIS) has also been introduced for the Android platform for a more productive debugging experience. For more information on how to use natvis, see Natvis Support for Android Debugging. 
     
• A variety of new samples have been published targeting the Android. These samples are mostly a port of the existing samples provided in the Android NDK but should provide you with a quick-start on how to use Visual Studio for targeting the Android Platform.

To wrap up, this is exciting time for the Visual C++ team and we would love to hear from you. Please submit bugs through Connect, suggestions on UserVoice and quick thoughts via Send-a-Smile in the Visual Studio IDE.