On March 18th, 2016, Microsoft’s acquisition of Xamarin officially closed.

We love C# and we want every developer to be able to take advantage of the power of .NET in every app, on every device. Being part of Microsoft makes it possible for us to do some incredible things, and today we are announcing several big changes to the way we ship our products.

Visual Studio now includes Xamarin

As of today, we are including Xamarin in Visual Studio at no extra cost.

Xamarin will be in every edition of Visual Studio, including the widely-available Visual Studio Community Edition, which is free for individual developers, open source projects, academic research, education, and small professional teams. Develop and publish native apps for iOS and Android with C# or F# from directly within Visual Studio with no limits on app size.

For developers on the Mac, Xamarin Studio is now available as a benefit of your Visual Studio Professional or Enterprise subscription. Developers can use the newly-created Xamarin Studio Community Edition for free.

To begin developing iOS and Android apps with the full power of Xamarin and C#, download Xamarin Studio or Xamarin for Visual Studio today.

We love open source

And we know you do too.

So we are announcing today that we have contributed the Mono Project to the .NET Foundation, including some previously-proprietary mobile-specific improvements to the Mono runtime. Mono will also be re-released under the MIT License, to enable an even broader set of uses for everyone. In addition, to help clarify users’ rights to Mono under Microsoft patents, Microsoft has issued a broad patent promise for Mono. Miguel has posted more details to the Mono Project blog.

These changes to Mono remove all barriers to adopting a modern, performant .NET runtime in any software product, embedded device, or game engine, and open the door to easily integrate C# with apps and games on iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows, as well as PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and any emerging platforms developers want to target in the future

But wait, there’s more!

In addition to these important steps, we are announcing today our commitment to open source the Xamarin SDKs for Android, iOS, and Mac under the MIT license in the coming months. This includes native API bindings and the basic command-line tools necessary to develop mobile apps. It also includes our popular cross-platform native UI toolkit, Xamarin.Forms.

With these changes, .NET is now open source and native on every single device, from mobile to desktop to cloud. This is a proud moment for all of us who have invested years into making .NET the best platform, and we know that this change will make it even easier for developers to invest their own time into building great software in C#.

We look forward to building a true open source community around Xamarin, and eagerly await the first pull requests.

Xamarin Insights is joining HockeyApp

Xamarin Insights delivers incredible value to mobile .NET developers by helping find and debug issues in your apps. Now we are ready to bring that experience to an even wider audience.

Over the next few months, Xamarin Insights will merge with HockeyApp bringing experiences that made Xamarin Insights so great into HockeyApp.

During this transition, current Xamarin Insights customers will be supported through existing contracts and Xamarin developers can still freely integrate Xamarin Insights into their apps. For more information, please see the FAQ.

Xamarin Test Cloud

This morning at the BUILD conference Scott Guthrie showed how Slack and Pinterest are using Xamarin Test Cloud and our 2,300-device test lab to make sure their apps work everywhere. We will continue to provide Xamarin Test Cloud as a standalone product, and we will be investing heavily in its future.

Xamarin University

On the Xamarin University front, we’re working with other teams within Microsoft to expand our content to cover mobile development with more Microsoft products. We’ve also launched a free self-guided class designed to get you up to speed on Xamarin quickly, and it even counts toward Xamarin Developer Certification! Start learning today.

To our customers

Our commitment to your success in mobile is stronger than ever. We want to continue to be your trusted partner, and you should hold us to the highest standards in the quality of our products and support.

If you have additional questions, visit our FAQ or reach out at hello@xamarin.com. We would love to hear from you.