Today, we are are happy to announce the release of our WatchKit Preview for Xamarin Studio, enabling you to build, run, and test your Apple Watch apps directly from Xamarin Studio.

WatchKit Templates

We’ve added new templates for Watch apps and Watch extensions inside Xamarin Studio. Start with a new or existing iOS app, add a Watch App to house your interface, and then add a Watch extension to power the interaction. Xamarin Studio does all of the heavy lifting for you.

Test in the Simulator

Get started testing your applications in the simulator so you can be ready when devices hit the market. Xamarin Studio has support for building, running, and debugging your Watch apps in app mode. You can also test your app in Glance and Notifications mode from the command line.

Get Started Today

You can download the bits for WatchKit Preview directly from the Xamarin Developer site. To get started with WatchKit, check out the WatchKit Preview guide.

Please note that this release is a Preview. It is not available on the Stable, Beta, or Alpha channels and is a separate install. We are working hard on adding even more features for WatchKit, including support for the Xamarin Designer for iOS and Visual Studio, in future releases.

Very Important: Since this release is missing our designer support, you must follow the steps outlined in the WatchKit Preview guide to build your UIs.

See everything that WatchKit support has to offer by running the WatchKit Catalog sample from our sample gallery.